




















































































































































































































































Class 

tot 

Copyright 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 


















THE RE-APPEARING 



























































































THE RE-APPEARING 

(IL EST RESSUSCIT^!) 

A Vision of Christ in Paris 


BY 

CHARLES MORICE 


TRANSLATED BY 

JOHN N. RAPHAEL 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

CONINGSBY DAWSON 



HODDER & STOUGHTON 
NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

dOjO ^ I 


rzs 

■ MsZ45 
Copy ^ 


Copyright, igii, 

By George H. Doran Company 


INTRODUCTION 






































































INTRODUCTION 


E very now and then there appears 
a book which stirs the heart of a 
nation by confessing to some un¬ 
der-current emotion whose presence we 
had barely begun to suspect, and by re¬ 
ducing that emotion to a thought, which 
a few advanced minds may have been 
thinking, but which none have dared to 
express. Such books are in the air long 
before they get written. Their author 
seems rather their transcriber than their 
originator. 

The Re-Appearing (II Est Ressus- 
cite) is such a book. It has woven the 
longing for an ethical awaking into a 
story, at once so personal and so universal 
that it has revealed France to herself. It 
reveals both her passionate desire for re¬ 
ligious idealism and her cynical despair 
of the ideal’s success. It is written as 
7 


8 


INTRODUCTION 


though it were a matter of recent history, 
still fresh in the minds of men, and nar¬ 
rates how Christ appeared in Paris on 
December 14th, 1910. 

There is significance in the fact that 
Paris is selected as the scene of His re¬ 
turn. When He came to the East He 
appeared in Palestine, the centre of re¬ 
ligion; when He comes to the West He 
appears in Paris, the centre of culture. 
Religion has always been the culture of 
the Orient, whereas culture has usurped 
the functions of religion in the modern 
Occident. 

The purpose of Christ’s re-appearing 
is to make an emphasized appeal to the 
Nicodemuses of the world—the men 
whose spiritual imagination is darkened 
by overmuch learning and whose wills 
are hesitant through impartiality. The 
common people, the women and the chil¬ 
dren, hear Christ gladly as they have done 
in every age. He does not concern Him¬ 
self with them on His second coming. 


INTRODUCTION 9 

^ ■ W- , .mV 

The heart of mankind has always ac¬ 
cepted Him; it is the intellect that has 
refused Him. To men whose emotions 
have been strangled by their intellects, to 
men who say, “Lord, I will follow Thee, 
but ,—” Christ now addresses Himself. 

Monsieur Charles Morice has typified 
this class in the character of Narda, a 
journalist admired for his brilliancy and 
acuteness, yet unsuccessful because of his 
lack of conviction and wavering direc¬ 
tion of purpose. He can see two sides 
to every question. He is keen to discern 
the faults in both his own and other men’s 
work. He has odds and ends of half- 
finished plays and poems locked away in 
his desk; his desire for impossible per¬ 
fection has curtailed his self-faith and 
daring. His power of criticism has with¬ 
ered his enthusiasm. Yet, for all he is a 
failure, he is feared and respected for the 
silent genius that he has. Given a cause 
that he believed in, he could become a 
leader of men. When, on December 


10 


INTRODUCTION 


nth, 1910, the last page of the evening 
papers of Paris is blank, it is to him that 
his brother journalists turn for an ex¬ 
planation as to one natively their supe¬ 
rior. 

The mystery as it unfolds itself, is told 
largely through the thoughts and judg¬ 
ments of Narda, the modern Nicodemus, 
and is told in a wonderfully natural and 
vivid fashion. A full day before anyone 
has become aware of Christ’s return, he 
has remarked a Stranger sitting opposite 
to him, the total impression of whose 
beauty is magnificently common-place, 
the sovereign serenity of whose soul 
shines out through His eyes with a con¬ 
stant, steady intensity. When the secret 
has at last been divulged, that the Son 
of God is resident in Paris, and the 
crowd of journalists have rushed off to 
U Hotel des Trois Rots where He is 
staying, it is with Narda that Christ holds 
His first conversation in the deserted 
cafe. 


INTRODUCTION 


11 


It is notable that in no point in the 
story does anyone doubt that the Stranger 
is Christ. No one raises the question, 
“Art Thou He that should come, or 
look we for another?” His authority is 
at once admitted. The only question 
raised is as to whether He is wanted— 
whether there is any room for Him in a 
modern commercial civilisation. The 
attitude of France is not one of doubt, 
but of expediency and criticism. The 
first remark that Narda addresses to 
Christ has this note of complaining in it: 
“Lord, I thought you would have re¬ 
turned in some other manner.” To 
which Jesus replies, “Have you no un¬ 
derstanding? Visible or invisible, the 
Son of Man returns every day.” 

In this reply of Jesus the keynote of 
the book is struck—the wise, unemotional 
sanity which makes the story not a fan¬ 
tastic vision, but a symbolised real hap¬ 
pening of daily occurrence. There is 
nothing abnormal about His re-appear- 


12 


INTRODUCTION 


ing, for He has never been absent. He 
becomes visible for eleven days simply 
that he may enforce His teachings, not 
to rehearse Galilean history. To His 
teaching He adds nothing, for as He tells 
Narda, “My work is finished for all eter¬ 
nity.” 

In its first surprised enthusiasm the 
heart of France is startled into the ex¬ 
clamation “My Lord and My God!” 
But after a moment’s reflection the cold 
intellect awakes, and begins to analyse 
and reason. Narda and his countrymen 
have been hurried into love without 
considering the cost of loving. The 
worth of anything to them, with their 
highly developed commercial sense, must 
be in some gain attached which is ma¬ 
terial and personal. U Hotel des Trois 
Rois is inundated by people who are will¬ 
ing to follow Christ if, by so doing, 
they are following their own interest. 
That interest may be represented in many 
ways, financial, the gratification of ir- 


INTRODUCTION 


13 


reverent curiosity, self-aggrandisement. 
Few of the people who come to Jesus 
can understand His saying, “My kingdom 
is not of this world.” To most of them 
it is extremely irritating, impractical and 
evasive. Life to them is something con¬ 
crete and external, not spiritual and in¬ 
ternal. 

In a series of brilliantly clever inci¬ 
dents Monsieur Morice points the con¬ 
trast between the standards and aims of 
Christ and those of Our Christian civilisa¬ 
tion. There is no grotesqueness, no ex¬ 
aggeration—this is all as it might happen. 
With a daring stroke of realism he in¬ 
troduces living persons into His narra¬ 
tive. 

In spite of misunderstandings, the at¬ 
mosphere of Christ’s presence begins to 
make itself felt. All over France ideals 
are heightened, no one can explain quite 
how or why. The psychologists declare 
that a new form of moral epidemic is 
abroad and a terribly contagious orre. 


14 


INTRODUCTION 


against which there is no known remedy. 
The effect is to dislocate all commercial 
and social relations—to destroy much of 
our boasted modern progress. There be¬ 
ing no evil in France, many people are 
thrown out of employ. Of necessity 
there is no need for a Police administra¬ 
tion or for law courts. While truth and 
love of one’s neighbour are the standards 
of conduct, there is scarcely any news of 
sufficient interest to be worth printing in 
the newspapers. Advertisements and 
stock quotations are of course stricken 
out, for they by their very nature are lies. 
The relations between capital and labour 
are dangerously simplified—dangerously 
for the capitalist. Fewer marriages take 
place—all those that are loveless are 
banned. Government becomes uneasy— 
this corrosive honesty is eating out the 
roots of society. The price of stocks is 
falling. There is no more gambling, 
consequently the Bourse is almost idle. 
The money-market is disorganised. Busi- 


INTRODUCTION 


15 


ness is at a standstill. There is a growing 
amount of unemployed labour. The first 
signs of panic are perceptible. 

With polished satire and ruthless frank¬ 
ness Monsieur Morice describes what 
would happen to modern commerce, up¬ 
on which all our modern social structure 
is founded, if Christ’s system of ethics 
was applied. There is no escape from 
his logic—it would mean the collapse of 
most of our methods of production and 
exchange. For whereas Christ’s system 
of economics has as its ultimate object 
only spiritual and unselfish gains, the ob¬ 
ject of the economics of the western world 
is definitely selfish and materialistic. 

Narda watches the changes which are 
resulting from Christ’s visible presence 
in Paris. Concentrated in the camera of 
his mind we view the struggle which is 
in process in all men’s minds. It is a 
fight between heart and intellect, between 
renunciation and self-gratification—a 
conflict which is eternal. Scepticism 


16 


INTRODUCTION 


plays no part in it—the choice is simple, 
between fleshly comfort and spiritual per¬ 
fection. It narrows itself down to the 
single question, which all France has 
shortly to answer, “Do I want Christ?” 

The way in which Narda argues is 
typical of the modern cultured mind, of 
which he is representative. He is op¬ 
pressed with knowledge, and yet is not 
wise. He knows too much about every¬ 
thing and too little about the one essential 
thing, the relation between God and him¬ 
self. He values thought, but he sets no 
store by afifection. Without affection he 
has not the energy of choice. He lacks 
and covets the valour of ignorance which 
transformed mediocre persons in the mid¬ 
dle ages into heroes and saints. He relies 
too much upon reason, which is the faith 
of the intellect, and not at all upon love, 
which is the faith of the heart. He is a 
conscious drifter, incapable of guiding 
his own life and too proud to submit 
himself to a higher guidance, even when 


INTRODUCTION 17 

he has recognised it as higher. He 
can turn ofif admirable literary phrases 
of a destructive kind, but he can ar¬ 
rive at no conclusions. He is perfectly 
aware of his failings. “I know what He 
wants,” he says, “but I don’t know what 
I want myself. The best thing about me 
is that I suffer for both by knowledge 
and my ignorance.” He has the insight 
to apprehend Christ’s message: “That 
is what He has come to tell us! It is 
that we must return to life. It is that 
we must be born again.” But he adds 
with cynical self-knowledge, “We have 
known that for a long time.” His final 
solution to his personal problem is one 
of vacillating selfishness; “Christ’s law 
is too hard. God thinks too well of us. 
The difficulty is my cowardice, I will 
wait.” 

Narda may wait, but the sequence of 
inevitable events marches forward. This 
excess of goodness cannot last. The crisis 
is imminent. The appetite for sensation 


18 


INTRODUCTION 


of an increasing number of men is al¬ 
ready satiated; they are biding their time 
till the hour is ripe to strike. 

The initial attack on the reign of virtue 
comes from the scientists. They go in a 
body to Christ, puffed up with the pride 
of statistical knowledge, to compel Him 
to answer questions. They have no rev¬ 
erence and, on the contrary, are rather 
patronising. Have they not already pen¬ 
etrated some little way into the forbidden 
secrets of life and death? Christ prom¬ 
ises to declare Himself next day at Mont¬ 
martre. 

Standing on the hill, with all Paris 
lying expectant at His feet, Christ tells 
the truth about our age. It is Pilate be¬ 
ing judged by Jesus—the cold, self-seek¬ 
ing western world brought to trial before 
compassion and faith. When He has 
ended, the women and children are hap¬ 
pily smiling; but no man asks himself 
the question, “Do I want Christ?” Every 


INTRODUCTION 


19 


man knows that, whatever his desire, he 
cannot afiford Him. Narda sums up the 
situation when he says to his friend Lar- 
rive, dear fellow, I repeat the whole 
thing is of no further interest. There 
will be twenty lines in the paper to-night, 
and those twenty lines will be the same 
in every rag in Paris.” 

But there still remains Christ; men’s 
indifference cannot annihilate Him. His 
official rejection by France, which forms 
the climax of the story, is carried out 
with all the cruel refinement of well-bred 
courtesy. There are no tauntings from 
soldiers, no mocking ceremonies of roy¬ 
alty, no thorn crowns; a cynical word po¬ 
litely spoken by smiling lips suffices. 

The book is as extraordinary for its re¬ 
straint as for its daring. It surprises as 
much by the things which it omits as by 
those which it includes. For instance, 
no word is said in criticism of any estab¬ 
lished form of government, religious or 


20 


INTRODUCTION 


secular. There is a reason for this: 
Christ addresses Himself to individuals 
and not to institutions. 

The purpose of The Re-Appearing 
is to confront society not with Christ’s 
teachings as academic theories, but with 
Christ Himself as an available means of 
life. 

The story tells itself naturally, as a con¬ 
temporary epic of the symbolised desire 
for righteousness. It is a mixture of 
drama and journalism, and it is the jour¬ 
nalistic touch which gives it its extreme 
vividity. For eleven days Christ is visi¬ 
ble in Paris, and eleven days of His actual 
presence in a Christian country are suffi¬ 
cient to re-enact in a modern way the 
tragedy which required three years for its 
accomplishment in Galilee. The climax 
of His rejection falls, significantly 
enough, on Christmas Day. 

This is a wounding book—wounding as 
a surgeon’s knife which pains to cure. It 
is as destructive of humanitarian cant as 


INTRODUCTION 


21 


it is of selfish sophistries. It is a keenly 
analytical criticism of our age and civil¬ 
isation, and arrives at truth by the rough- 
paved road of satire. Allowance has to 
be made for the licence which is permitted 
to French literature in the treatment of 
all intellectual questions, religious or 
otherwise. The Re-Appearing must be 
read and judged as a French book, and 
not as an English translation. 

The first impression that it is likely to 
make is of its amazing cleverness. It 
stimulates thought at every point and 
pushes back the horizons of the imagina¬ 
tion. It may stir up anger, but it is the 
anger of awakened conscience. No one 
can read it without being aroused to dis¬ 
cussion, and no one can discuss it without 
coming to perceive that it contains more 
than mere cleverness—sincerity, penetrat¬ 
ing insight and a sense of righteousness 
which is almost savage. The more one 
reflects upon it, the more inevitably just 
do its conclusions become. Its most ex- 


22 


INTRODUCTION 


traordinary quality is its convincing nat¬ 
uralness; we are compelled, perhaps 
against our wills, to recognise that did 
Christ appear in Paris to-day the attitudes 
of commerce and culture toward Him 
would be very much as Monsieur Morice 
states. 

CoNiNGSBY Dawson. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER pack 


I 

The Modern Miracle . 

. . 19 

II 

At l’Hotel des Trois Rois . 

. . 53 

III 

“ Lazarus, Come Forth ! ” . 

. . 82 

IV 

A Parisian Nicodemus . 

. . 108 

V 

The Sermon on Montmarte 

. . 139 

VI 

The Crisis on the Bourse . 

. . 152 

VII 

The Rejection .... 

. . 195 




I will follow Thee: but — 

(Luke ix: 6i). 


THE MODERN MIRACLE 


THE RE-APPEARING 


I 

THE MODERN MIRACLE 

A t the very same hour that morn¬ 
ing, December nth, every Paris¬ 
ian made the same grimace. 
They opened their eyes and mouths wide 
as they unfolded their newspapers and 
refolded them again. The back page of 
each was blank. 

What did it mean? What could be the 
reason? Had every advertising contract 
in Paris been broken? 

People flew into the streets and rushed 
to the newspaper kiosks. There were no 
newspapers left. All had been bought 
up at an early hour. The newspaper 
vendors were explaining to the crowd that 
they understood nothing at all about it, 
and kept on repeating that all the papers, 
19 


20 THE RE-APPEARING 


every one of them, from those which is¬ 
sued two million copies daily to those 
which appeared intermittently, had come 
out that morning with their back page 
blank, entirely blank. 

People rushed to the newspaper offices. 
The commissionaires had received orders 
to let nobody in whom they did not know. 
They, like the newspaper vendors, could 
give no explanation. 

Clever people who knew, or thought 
they knew something about newspaper 
management went off to question men of 
business and the shopkeepers, who the day 
before had paid their good money for the 
privilege of praising their products and 
their goods in print. Most of these cap¬ 
italists admitted that they had no answer 
to give, and that they were as astonished as 
everybody else. A few of them, out of 
vanity, let it be understood that they knew 
the reason of the phenomenon, but that 
they had promised to say nothing. The 
crowd became so angry with them that 


THE RE-APPEARING 21 


they soon regretted their unworthy sub¬ 
terfuge. 

The patience of the Parisians, which is 
short, was rapidly disappearing. 

At noon, the Bourse, where prices had 
been very bad for several weeks, under¬ 
went something of a crisis. Prices in all 
the markets dropped to a figure below 
any that had yet been quoted. 

In the afternoon chattering and ex¬ 
cited groups formed upon the boulevards. 
Everybody was impatiently waiting for 
the evening papers. 

Will ^‘it’’ be blank? 

^Tt” was. 

People rushed to the cafes earlier than 
usual that afternoon, and everybody had 
a newspaper. The curious asked ques¬ 
tions of the curious. Strangers ran up to 
perfect strangers, showing them the blank 
back page of half a dozen different news¬ 
papers and arguing about them. 

But not only was the back page of the 
evening papers blank.—There were blank 


22 THE RE-APPEARING 


spaces in the advertisement columns on 
the other pages. This refinement of mys¬ 
tery exasperated the journalists. These 
men, professional pryers into secrets, were 
furious at being teased in this way on 
their own domain. Here was a question 
to which they had no answer for the wait¬ 
ing public. In fact, the question seemed 
unanswerable. And this evening there 
were more blank spaces in the newspapers 
than ever. Where would it stop? What 
would happen next? Would “the white 
sickness” eat up “the copy” after it had di¬ 
gested the advertisements? 

At the Poule d'Or in the Rue Mont¬ 
martre, where a number of reporters met 
each evening from six to eight, excite¬ 
ment was at its height. It could be meas¬ 
ured by the unusually large piles of white 
saucers on the tables, for each white sau¬ 
cer meant another drink, and Frenchmen 
when excited need refreshment. 

“We are all mad!” cried Larrive, a tall, 
pale young man, who wore spectacles, and 


THE RE-APPEARING 23 


whose pockets always bulged with scien¬ 
tific pamphlets which he bought from the 
tin boxes on the quays of the Seine. “We 
are all crazy. We see white as other peo¬ 
ple sometimes see red! This is some sort 
of suggestion! Some sort of collective 
illusion! The truth is that the pages are 
blackened with print as usual, because it 
is impossible that they should be anything 
else, but we don’t see it. . . 

“It is you who are crazy!” interrupted 
Crucol, flapping a copy of the Revolution 
in his comrade’s face. “Do we see the 
other pages as blank? There is no illu¬ 
sion at all. Something extraordinary has 
happened. It is probably the first of 
a series of extraordinary happenings. 
Something or other is imminent.” 

“But somebody must be responsible for 
the series,” said several men at once. 
“Who can it be?” 

“Exactly, who?” muttered Crucol. 

He wrinkled his narrow forehead, 
which no thought had ever wrinkled be- 


24 THE RE-APPEARING 


fore, in a vain effort to discover some¬ 
thing. 

Then, throwing out his arms, he said: 

“I give it up.” 

A little distance from them, with his 
elbows on the table and his head in his 
hands, sat Louis Narda, a journalist well- 
known and almost famous for the clever¬ 
ness with which he unravelled newspaper 
mysteries. He sat and pondered. Lar- 
rive pointed to him. 

^^Narda is also puzzling it out.” 

^^He may have discovered something,” 
said Edmond Peissier, a fat man who 
was always ready to follow up the ideas 
of other men. He crossed over to 
Narda’s table. 

“Well, my good sir,” he asked in a 
tone of mingled deference and irony, 
“what are you thinking about?” 

Narda made no reply. Peissier 
touched him on the shoulder. Narda 
jumped like a man awakened from a 
dream. He looked at Peissier for a mo- 


THE RE APPEARING 25 


ment without seeing him; then with a 
passionate gesture he shouted: 

“Go to blazes!” 

“You! Why, you don’t mean to say 
that you’ve not cleared up the mystery!” 
exclaimed Peissier, in a tone of flattering 
astonishment. 

“I’m trying to. Leave me alone!” 

Peissier went back to the others. 

“Whoever clears this thing up will 
make a fortune,” said a newcomer, a tall, 
untidy man with long hair and a flat nose, 
whose name was Isidore Frene. 

“How’s that?” clamoured everyone at 
once. 

“I’ll tell you. The head sent for me 
just now.” 

“Baunu-Llavari?” 

“He himself. ^Look here, Frene,’ he 
said, 'UAvant-l'Aube must be the first 
paper to publish the truth. Whoever 
finds a clue can come to me for ten thou¬ 
sand francs, and there’s a hundred thou¬ 
sand for the man who brings me the com- 


26 THE RE-APPEARING 


plete story before two o’clock to-morrow 
morning.’ ” 

“A hundred thousand francs!” 

“Yes. And he added: Tell every¬ 
body in the office what I have said, and 
as it is quite possible that none of our staff 
may hit on the solution of the mystery, 
you may tell every journalist you see 
about my offer. It is open to every news¬ 
paper-man in Paris. And if the winner 
cares to do so he can come on to the staff 
of UAvant-VAube at a salary of three 
thousand francs a month, with a ten years’ 
contract.’ ” 

“Good Lord!” 

“That’s my message,” Frene concluded. 

The cafe emptied immediately. The 
journalists rushed out, without waiting to 
make plans, eager to share in the cam¬ 
paign. On the pavement outside, Lar- 
rive took hold of Crucol by the arm as he 
was signing to a taxi-cab. 

“Look here, old man,” he said. “Let’s 
run this thing together, and if we clear it 


THE RE-APPEARING 27 


up we can divide the spoils. IVe got an 
idea.” 

“An hallucination? A suggestion? 
An illusion?” 

“No. Better than that.” 

“All right, then. Speak out.” 

Larrive, who was a much taller man 
than Crucol, bent down and whispered 
one word. 

Crucol started, then thought awhile. 

“Just possible,” he said. “But surely 
it would ruin even him. It’s true his 
country would refund the money it cost 
him. He would have shown his clever¬ 
ness. . . . Well, jump into the cab, 

anyway. Perhaps you’re right. Who 
can say? Prince Victor . . 

“Keep your tongue quiet,” said Lar¬ 
rive. The two men drove off together to 
the German Embassy. 

Meanwhile Narda, in the almost empty 
cafe, paid for his drink and strolled out. 
His eyes were shining with excitement. 
He, too, called a cab and told the driver 


28 THE RE APPEARING 


to hurry to the offices of the Confedera¬ 
tion Generale du Travail—the famous 
C.G.T. or strike organisation. 

“That’s it,” he muttered to himself, as 
the cab drove off. “That’s where it 
comes from! The printers have refused 
to make up any new advertisements and 
have smashed up the old plates. The 
managers of the papers dare not tell the 
public what has happened. It’s sabotage. 
Tapaud and Company again. But why? 
They won’t tell me, but that doesn’t mat¬ 
ter. I can find out how they have done 
it; we’ll find out why later on.” 

That night very few journalists went 
home to bed. 

At about four in the morning at Le 
Lapin CrUy near the markets, Peissier and 
Narda came in by different doors at al¬ 
most the same moment. They shook 
hands and sat down in silence at the same 
table. Narda, who was usually calm 
enough, was very nervous. He glanced 


THE RE-APPEARING 29 


at his comrade, and his look clearly told 
him to be quiet. Then, with his elbows 
on the table in his favourite position, he 
leaned his head upon his hands. Peissier, 
who was something of a philosopher, sat 
back and smoked cigarettes. 

The whole army of Paris reporters 
came in by ones and twos and groups of 
three and more. Le Lapin Cru was a 
very favourite haunt of theirs at night. 
It was there that they talked over the lat¬ 
est news, and the newsboys brought in the 
morning papers fresh from the press be¬ 
fore they went down to the kiosks with 
them. 

In a few minutes there was not a free 
table, not even an empty chair in the big 
cafe. The hum of conversation rose into 
a roar, a sort of angry symphony punc¬ 
tuated by the rapping of an occasional 
glass upon the wooden tables. All the 
men looked tired and disappointed. 
Larrive, Crucol, and Frene were sitting 


30 THE RE-APPEARING 


at the same table as Narda and Peissier. 

don’t mind telling you at once,” said 
Frene, folding his arms and sitting back, 
“that I have found out absolutely nothing. 
What luck have you had, Narda?” 

“There’s nothing to find out,” said he, 
lifting his big black head from his little 
white hands. 

“What do you mean?” 

“Too much for us,” said Narda, accen¬ 
tuating each separate syllable. “Too 
much for us. See what I mean?” 

“Can’t say that I do,” said Frene. 

“Exactly. There’s nothing to be un¬ 
derstood. There’s nothing to look for. 
It is there and it isn’t!” 

“That’s what I said at La Poule D'Or/' 
cried Larrive. “The page looks blank to 
us and it isn’t blank at all, because it can’t 
be blank.” 

“If you like. That’s about what 
I think,” returned Narda, smiling. 
“Though I must say that such an idea 
seems utterly ridiculous.” 


THE RE-APPEARING 31 


“It is just as ridiculous/’ said Larrive, 
“to try to explain the impossible.” 

“You are both mad,” exclaimed Peis- 
sier, banging the table with his fist. 
“You are mystic mad, the pair of you! 
Go and take a cold bath.” 

“You had better go to bed,” said Narda, 
“or stop and think a bit, if you can think. 
We have all been trying to clear this 
thing up, and not one of us has hit upon 
the right clue. Everyone of us has asked 
himself: Who? Why? How? and 
these three questions remain unanswered. 
^How’ is as unanswerable as ‘why’ and 
‘who.’ The printers don’t know how the 
pages have come out of the rotaries with¬ 
out a mark on them, and the men in the 
composing rooms don’t understand it 
either.” 

“Perhaps they won’t say,” hinted Cru- 
col. 

Narda shrugged his shoulders. 

“What! Not one of them!” he said. 

“That’s the puzzle. There must be 


82 THE RE-APPEARING 


someone pretty powerful behind this 
thing. Somebody or some group. It 
must have cost a trifle.” 

“A trifle!” echoed Narda, raising his 
voice. “Have you thought about what it 
must have cost? You may not know that 
all the advertisers have insisted upon pay¬ 
ment of damages, and that they have all 
got their money. Can you calculate what 
that represents? Do you know anyone in 
the whole world, banker, oil-king, Croe¬ 
sus, who could put such sums down on the 
table. For the papers have indemnified 
the advertisers, and they have not paid 
with their own money!” 

“That’s true,” said Larrive. “And the 
managers declare that though the money 
was deposited to their accounts, they don’t 
know where it came from.” 

“Good Lord, who has done this thing?” 
shouted Frene. “Who?” 

“As for me, I thought of Prince Victor 
first,” said Larrive. “It seemed a possi¬ 
bility. Crucol and I——” 



THE RE-APPEARING 33 


‘‘We had our trouble for nothing,” 
Crucol interrupted. “My idea was the 
Kaiser, and there was nothing in that 
either.” 

“Well,” said Narda, “I tried something 
else. My idea was the Socialists. The 
beggars who ride rough-shod over society 
and make themselves a perfect nuisance 
to us, for our own ultimate good. But I 
was wrong, like the rest of you.” 

A group had formed round Narda’s 
table. He was very much esteemed by 
his fellow-journalists, not so much be¬ 
cause of his cleverness and his professional 
success, as because of his personal worth. 
He was respected as a thinker and a man 
of letters, who had not realised his dream. 
He was known to have done a great deal 
of library work. Men said that he had 
drawers full of notes, half-written works 
on various subjects, novels and plans for 
novels, poems or bits of poems, essays, 
plays, and scenarios. His comrades 
thought a great deal of him, and expected 


34 THE RE-APPEARING 


much, and newspaper owners had faith in 
his opinion. But these last words of his 
brought forth some protest. 

“The working men are a force of na¬ 
ture,” someone said. “You had the right 
idea, Narda, but you set about it in the 
wrong way.” 

“Why?” he asked. 

“Because, in your heart of hearts you 
hate the Socialists. We all know that. 
You are a reactionary at heart, and you 
can’t expect the enemy to let you into 
their secret.” 

“Bravo,” said Narda, laughing. “So 
you think that the proletariat, working to¬ 
gether for once, is really going to triumph 
at last, thanks to the discipline which for¬ 
mer strikes have taught them to be neces¬ 
sary? My dear Peissier, you are some¬ 
thing of a mystic yourself. No,” said 
Narda more seriously, “my idea would 
not hold water because a complete under¬ 
standing among all the printers and com- 


THE RE-APPEARING 35 


positors of Paris would be a miracle. I 

prefer to believe in-” 

“In what?” 

“For the moment,” said Narda, with¬ 
out replying, “we must comfort ourselves 

with the thought-” 

“That the papers of December 12 th will 
be here in five minutes,” interrupted 
Crucol, “and that we shall see for our¬ 
selves whether ‘It’ is blank again. We 
may even find the answer to the riddle in 
this morning’s papers. So for the time 
being let’s talk of something else. Who 
says a game of cards?” 

Nobody fell in with Crucol’s idea. 

“We can only admit,” said Narda, 
“that we are face to face with an inexplic¬ 
able mystery. Crucol is right. We can 
only wait and see.” 

“Nothing is inexplicable,” expostulated 

Larrive, “science has taught us-” 

Narda burst out laughing boisterously. 
“I was waiting for that,” he said. “I 





86 THE RE-APPEARING 


even wondered why you were so long 
getting on your hobby horse. So in your 
opinion, science——’’ 

“You can laugh as much as you like,” 
said Larrive. “Science is at the root of 
it.” 

“Explain yourself.” 

“Science must be at the root of it be¬ 
cause it can’t be anything else.” 

“Powerfully reasoned,” commented 
Narda. “Perhaps you will explain how 
science intervened and what it did.” 

“You must ask the scientists.” 

“Haven’t you done so? Perhaps we 
may hit on something while we are wait¬ 
ing for their solution. What do you say 
to radium?” 

Larrive’s eyes flashed. 

“I’ve thought of that,” he said. 

“Of course you have. Madame Curie 
has found means to produce radium at 
will whenever she likes, and she has be¬ 
gun to show the almighty power that her 



THE RE-APPEARING 37 


discovery has given her by interfering 
with the ordinary course of commercial 
and public life. Simple, isn’t it? Most 
ingenious! Your appetite for the super¬ 
natural is quite insatiable, Larrive.” 

^‘Not at all. I’m trying to find a log¬ 
ical explanation and-” 

“And any explanation will strike you 
as perfectly logical although you are 
quite incapable of understanding it, so 
long as it be given you in the name of sci¬ 
ence. You give science the credit which 
you would refuse to God.” 

“God,” echoed Larrive contemptu¬ 
ously. “There is only one God.” 

“I know,” said Narda, taking a packet 
of cigarettes from his pocket, “and His 
name is science. Take a cigarette. 
Smoke and keep quiet.” 

At this moment every man leapt to his 
feet. The newsboys came in with their 
bundles of papers, damp with fresh ink, 
upon their shoulders. They were rushed 


38 THE RE-APPEARING 


at and their papers torn from them. 
They gave them up without resistance and 
stood waiting to see the effect. 

“Blank!” 

“Good Lord, there are two of them!” 

“Two blank pages!” 

“And great blank spaces all over the 
others!” 

“Whatever has been paid for has been 
cut out!” 

The journalists were as white as those 
astounding white pages. They unfolded 
the papers wide, and stood staring at 
them, thrembling with excitement, their 
eyes wide open with astonishment and a 
touch of fear. 

“And not a word of explanation any¬ 
where,” said Peissier, who had run his eye 
over a number of papers. “They behave 
as though nothing had happened. ‘Rec¬ 
onciliation of Jaures and Briand.’ 
‘Drought on the Seine.’ ‘Flight Ten 
Miles High.’ ... As though these 
were the things that mattered!” 


THE RE-APPEARING 39 


“Mine is the only possible explana¬ 
tion,” muttered Larrive. 

Narda suddenly, with an angry gesture, 
rolled his paper into a ball and threw it 
full into Larrive’s face. Then he sat 
down again without a word. 

“Confound you,” said Larrive, rubbing 
his nose. 

Narda sat thinking. His elbows were 
not upon the table as usual. He had 
thrown himself back on the seat with his 
thumbs tucked into the arm-holes of his 
waistcoat, and his eyes looked unseeing 
across the room. Little by little his gaze 
concentrated and fixed itself on the table 
opposite, while his face assumed an inde¬ 
finable expression of calm and content. 
About six yards away from him, at the 
table opposite, a man was seated by him¬ 
self. Narda stared at him. There was 
really nothing remarkable about this man 
except, perhaps, just that—that there was 
nothing particular to be said about him. 

He was not in any way unusual. He 


40 THE RE-APPEARING 


was very handsome, but his beauty was in 
no way astonishing. If he had not been 
handsome one would have been surprised 
at it, astounded that he was not so. His 
beauty consisted in the perfect equilib¬ 
rium of everything about him. Its total 
impression was magnificently common¬ 
place. It had to be. It was made neces¬ 
sary by the sovereign, ineffable serenity of 
soul which shone from this man’s eyes, 
with a constant, steady intensity of light 
which outshone the glitter of the electric 
lamps and faded into a golden mist round 
the fair hair, which he wore rather long. 
This light in the stranger’s eyes did not 
dazzle Narda. He felt in some way that 
it lit up his inner consciousness. And he 
sat looking at the unknown with a sym¬ 
pathy in which there was both confidence 
and deference. He had no wish to go 
and speak to him or question him. He 
was fully satisfied by the mere fact of his 
presence, his real physical presence. 

^That is a real man,” he said to him- 


THE RE APPEARING 41 


self, “not a puppet, like the other fellows 
and myself. But how long has he been 
here?” He didn’t remember seeing him 
come in. Of course there was nothing 
extraordinary in the fact that the stranger 
should have passed unnoticed in the ex¬ 
citement of the moment and the discus¬ 
sions which had been going on. The 
main thing was that he was there. 

No, he didn’t want to ask him any ques¬ 
tions. The mere fact that he showed no 
uneasiness made it perfectly clear that 
there was no reason for uneasiness, that 
everything would shortly be explained, 
and that the explanation would be marvel¬ 
lously simple. 

Correcting his frame of mind in ac¬ 
cordance with a sentiment that was not at 
all familiar to him, Narda cast a look of 
pity at the excited group of brother jour¬ 
nalists. He had not noticed their chatter 
for several minutes. The noise of it had 
been blotted out as though a door had 
been closed between him and them. Sud- 


42 THE RE APPEARING 


denly he heard it again. They were still 
talking vehemently about nothing, and 
Narda heard Frene, in his squeaky voice, 
made the more piercing by annoyance, 
sleeplessness, and drink, saying, 

‘‘You are all wrong. I have hit upon 
the secret. It is an advertisement.” 

“What?” 

“Yes. In a few days’ time you will see 
in red letters upon these blank pages the 
words: 'Excelsissimus! An Illustrated 
Paper appearing Twice a Day at Five 
Centimes, with Fifty or a Hundred Pages 
of Text and Five Square Yards of Pic¬ 
tures!’ Don’t you see? It is a news¬ 
paper trust. The managers of all the 
newspapers are working hand in hand. 
Llavari was simply playing the fool with 
me.” 

“H’m,” said Crucol, thoughtfully, 
“that’s not a bad idea. It’s not impos¬ 
sible.” 

Peissier protested. 

“Rubbish. An understanding of that 


THE RE APPEARING 43 


kind is even more unlikely among news¬ 
paper proprietors than among the print¬ 
ers. This is not a trust of newspapers. 
It is their death. It is our death! White 
leprosy!” 

“The white terror,” said Crucol. 

For just one moment Narda had the 
idea of drawing his comrades’ attention 
to the stranger, whom none of them 
seemed to have noticed. But as the 
thought crossed his mind the stranger got 
up. Had he guessed Narda’s intention? 
Did he want to dissuade him? His gaze, 
calm and luminous, rested a moment on 
the journalist’s eyes, and Narda could 
have sworn that in that gaze he gave him 
an appointment for the morrow at the 
same hour in the same place. Involun¬ 
tarily he made a gesture of assent, of 
which the stranger took no notice. He 
put a large round felt hat upon his head, 
threw a great black cloak about his shoul¬ 
ders, and went out without paying the 
slightest attention either to the people 


44 THE RE-APPEARING 


present or to what they were saying or 
doing. 

When he had gone the tavern seemed 
quite empty to Narda. In his turn he 
took down his hat and coat from the rack, 
and went away without vouchsafing a re¬ 
ply to the questions of the other journal¬ 
ists, who were all astonished that he no 
longer shared their agitation. 

A few hours later Paris went distracted. 
There were significant symptoms of dis¬ 
tress on the Bourse. There was no busi¬ 
ness doing. The oldest agent de change 
or sworn broker on the Bourse had never 
seen anything like it in all his experience. 
Men with stock to sell and buy, who as a 
rule make such an uproar on the steps 
of the Bourse from twelve to three, were 
silent, and from the top of the steps this 
still and mournful crowd contrasted curi¬ 
ously with the uneasy crowd below on the 
big square, which was excitedly gesticulat¬ 
ing and shouting. 


THE RE-APPEARING 45 


Meanwhile, serious rioting was in prog¬ 
ress at Montmartre. For no definite rea¬ 
son that anybody could suggest, popular 
opinion had insisted that the Monarchists 
were responsible for what was happening. 
The mob in Paris is always prone to the 
simplest symbolism, and people saw in 
this extraordinary transformation of the 
newspapers of all shades of political opin¬ 
ion into white flags proof of a plot which 
outstripped the pretensions of a Duke of 
Orleans. There was talk in the crowd of 
a descendant of Henry V. Rumours 
were spread that a Spanish Bourbon, who 
declared himself the heir by marriage of 
the Count de Chambord, was offering 
himself to France as the necessary man, 
the providential saviour of the country, 
the only master who was capable of re¬ 
storing order definitely in a country which 
syndical revolt had stirred unceasingly. 

The minds of the people were terribly 
excited by this perspective of a stranger’s 
usurpation of the throne. Although the 


46 THE RE-APPEARING 


Republic had until then failed to please 
many, it became dear to all at the first 
sign of danger, and the loyal ardour of 
the Republicans was made clear on the 
unfortunate attempt of the camelots of the 
king to take advantage of the excitement 
which prevailed. 

These young men, hoping to exploit the 
general uneasiness to the Pretender’s ad¬ 
vantage, had organised a big meeting in 
Montmartre, at which the question was 
put: “Has not the present constitution 
lasted too long?” The meeting was at¬ 
tended by the two opposing crowds of re¬ 
actionaries and Socialists, and there was 
bloodshed. A huge force of police sur¬ 
rounded the combatants, who suddenly 
made comrnon cause and turned on the 
police. The Republican Guard had to 
be called out, as well as two squadrons of 
the Paris garrison. The battle lasted 
three whole hours. There were eleven 
hundred and thirteen arrests, an enormous 


THE RE-APPEARING 47 

number were wounded, and twelve men 
killed. 

But when the evening papers appeared, 
three-quarters of the sheets were blank. 
The prefect of police had the happy idea 
of ordering thousands of the papers to be 
thrown into the middle of the crowd. 
Life-protectors, sticks and revolvers 
dropped spontaneously from hands which 
reached out for the papers, and the 
shrieks of hatred and of rage died away in 
gasps of astonishment at the sight of these 
newspapers with their blank pages. A 
deep silence fell over Paris. 

Nobody questioned his neighbour, for 
everyone recognised that all were equally 
ignorant. They each waited, prepared 
for almost anything to happen. 

That night the journalists met as usual 
at Le Lapin Cru. They were worn out, 
feverish, and weary, for they had spent 
two sleepless nights and days. 


48 THE RE-APPEARING 


In this group of men who were at one 
moment excited and agitated, and at an¬ 
other deadly dull, Narda alone was at 
peace, and almost cheerful. This irri¬ 
tated his companions. 

^‘You’ve managed to get some sleep, 
haven’t you?” 

“You’ve found out something 1” 

“Why don’t you speak?” 

He could not. He could not tell them. 
Since the previous day a gulf divided him 
from this artificial world, where a few 
hours ago he bustled and scrambled and 
hurried here and there, as his companions 
were hurrying and scrambling still. Into 
this great gulf the last five or six years of 
his life had fallen, and they had been for¬ 
gotten as though they had never existed. 
On the other hand, his earlier years, those 
of his early youth and of his childhood, 
had graven themselves on the tablets of 
his memory in curiously rich and living 
colours. He was once more a lad in love 
with the heroic charm of life, planning 


THE RE-APPEARING 49 


the programme of a life worth living, and 
of a sudden, Verlaine’s lovely line leapt 
out of his youth like a perfumed breath: 

“L’enfance baptismale emerge du 
pccheur.” ^ 

It seemed to him as though he were 
about to reconquer the naive triumph of 
his childhood, and by reconquering it to 
become, in the sweet words of the Bi¬ 
ble, “worthy to enter the Kingdom of 
Heaven.” 

He felt no impatience. In a sort of 
happy vigil he was enjoying a delicious 
foretaste of perfect happiness, enjoying it 
with perfect confidence. He had come 
to the trysting place. He knew that the 
Other Man would be punctual. He did 
not even glance up at the time, though 
the least motion of his head would have 
shown him the clock, which he knew to 
be on the wall at his right. He remem¬ 
bered with a smile how often during long 

1 “Out from the sinner’s soul springs the child’s inno¬ 
cence.” 


50 THE RE-APPEARING 


nights of waiting he had accused that old 
Swiss clock of counting the minutes all 
too slowly. Time now had lost its hold 
upon him. 

All of a sudden there was a hubbub out¬ 
side. The doors slammed open and 
closed again, and the newsboys came rush¬ 
ing in with the papers. But when they 
were inside the cafe they remained mo¬ 
tionless. Their eyes were fixed, and they 
were glittering and staring. Everyone 
of them was mortally pale, and the ex¬ 
pression of real tragedy upon the poor 
little faces of these Parisian night birds 
was so unusual, so out of all proportion, 
that the journalists sat and stared at them 
in turn. 

At last one of the newsboys spoke. 

‘‘He has come!” he said. 

“Who? What has come?” asked 
Frene. 

“Jesus Christ.” 

“Eh, what? What are you talking 
about?” 


THE RE-APPEARING 51 


The journalists made a mad rush for 
the papers. They were blank. 

This time, they were entirely blank, 
except for the title on the front page; but 
on the last page, on the right-hand top 
side of the sheet, were a few lines printed 
in small letters. These read:— 

“The Son of God has no need of ad¬ 
vertisement. He is staying at rHotel 
des Trois Rois on La Place de rEtoile. 
He will receive, from midday to mid¬ 
day, all day long, this 14 th of Decem¬ 
ber and to-morrow.” 

Every man read this to himself, then 
read it again, then read it over a third 
time. And for some moments there was 
no sound in the cafe but the rustling of the 
damp sheets in the trembling hands of the 
journalists. 

One by one the men looked up from 
their papers, looked up from these dis¬ 
tracting words, and glanced at one an- 


52 THE RE-APPEARING 


other. Their eyes asked questions to 
which questions were the only answer. 
The newsboys watched the journalists 
staring at one another, waited for them to 
speak, and as they remained silent their 
stupefaction reacted on the lads. 

“We are forgetting our work,’’ said 
one of them. 

“So are we,” cried Crucol, coming to 
himself with a start. “I’m off to La 
Place de l^Etoile/' 

“So are we! So are we!” And they 
rushed to the doors. 

“Come on!” cried one of the newsboys. 
He slapped the flat of his hand on what 
remained of his bundle of papers. 

“To-day this is minted gold,” he said. 
“An article, perhaps, by Jesus Himself! 
I shan’t take less than a franc for a paper 
to-day. Is it a deal?” 

“Right!” shouted the others. 


II 

AT L’HOTEL DES TROIS ROIS 

N ARDA had watched the journal¬ 
ists and newsboys start up out of 
the cafe without seeing them. 
He was quite alone in the tavern, which 
had been so full and so noisy a few mo¬ 
ments before. The blank sheets of paper 
which the journalists had thrown down in 
their hurry were scattered about the floor, 
and Narda was absorbed in his dreams, 
quite indifferent to the hour and place 
and to what had happened. 

Surprised at seeing him sitting there, 
the manager went up to him, carrying a 
paper in his hand. 

“Monsieur Narda,” he said. 

Narda raised his head. 

“Haven’t you seen this?” showing him 
the paper. 

“No,” said Narda carelessly. “Is there 
any news?” 


53 


54 THE RE-APPEARING 


“News?” cried the manager. “Look!” 

Narda looked at the paper, saw that it 
was blank, and gave it back without show¬ 
ing the least surprise. 

“Gracious me! Are you blind?” And 
the manager pointed to the three lines on 
the back page. 

“Queer,” said Narda in a tone which 
showed that he wanted to be left alone. 
And he pushed the paper from him with¬ 
out looking at it. 

The manager gasped with astonish¬ 
ment. The paper fell from his hands on 
to the table, making a sort of screen be¬ 
tween Narda and the table opposite. 
Then as it fell and Narda looked across 
the room he got up, and pushed past the 
manager. It would not be enough to say 
that the man moved aside. He disap¬ 
peared. He vanished. He was gone al¬ 
together when Narda found himself sit¬ 
ting beside The Man on the dingy seat of 
Le Lapin Cru. 


THE RE APPEARING 55 


They began to talk. 

“Lord, I thought you would have re¬ 
turned in some other manner.” 

Jesus replied: 

“Have you, too, no understanding? 
Visible or invisible, the Son of Man re¬ 
turns every day.” 

“And if He show himself to mortal 
eyes to-day, is it with an intention which 
He will allow us to understand. No 
doubt He comes to finish——” 

Narda broke oflp, seeing that Jesus 
smiled. He understood, without being 
told, that Jesus was smiling at the ques¬ 
tion which he had not yet finished. And 
he felt a moment’s annoyance that what 
he meant to say had been guessed be¬ 
fore he said it. 

“So we are not to chat?” he said. 

“Men do not chat with Me,” said Jesus. 

Narda bowed his head. 

“However, for the sake of the readers 
to whom you will report My answers, I 



56 THE RE-APPEARING 


will permit you, as at this same moment I 
am permitting your comrades, to ask Me 
questions.” 

^^As you are permitting my comrades?” 
repeated Narda in astonishment. 

“Do you not know that they have gone 
to interview Me at I'Hotel des Trois 
Roisr 

A deep wrinkle of disappointment 
formed on Narda’s forehead. 

Jesus smiled again, and in accents of 
infinite tenderness, replying to the young 
man’s thoughts, He said: 

“Yes, child. But I am all yours just 
the same. I am with you as you under¬ 
stand Me. Just as I am with each one of 
them according to their comprehension.” 

“My Lord and my God,” whispered 
Narda, clasping his hands. 

Then resuming the sentence he had be¬ 
gun: 

“You have come, no doubt, to finish the 
work You had begun two thousand years 
ago?” 


THE RE-APPEARING 57 


^‘The work is finished for all eternity.” 

“Then,” cried Narda, in sudden excite¬ 
ment, “why did You not conquer?” 

“Because I wished to leave you the 
merit of the conquest.” 

“But why do Your own people betray 
You? Why did the doctors deny one an¬ 
other and deny You?” 

“Are the decisions of the Academy of 
Science any more certain or any clearer 
than those of the doctors?” 

“Why are Your gospels all apocry¬ 
phal?” 

“Whose are the human masterpieces 
and the great inventions? Whose, for in¬ 
stance, are the poems of Homer? Is it 
not wiser to give your understanding to 
the enjoyment of the work than to search 
for the name of the author? You have 
already forgotten the names of the great 
lawyers who drew up your legal code. 
You call it the ‘Code Napoleon.’ In the 
same way you have the Gospel of Jesus. 
Does it matter who wrote it down? Be- 


58 THE RE-APPEARING 


gin by comprehending it. When you 
read your legal code you look in it for the 
meaning of the legislator. When you 
read My Gospel ask yourself what is the 
doctrine of the Saviour. Do not pause at 
the letter which killeth. The spirit alone 
quickeneth. Would you not reproach 
Me if I had given you peremptory proof 
of authenticity? I should have reduced 
your reason to servitude and your adora¬ 
tion would be that of a slave. I have left 
your faith its merit. I have left you an 
excuse for doubt, and do you complain?” 

“Lord, perhaps You are merely myself 
—myself made perfect.” 

“One of you has said, ^there is no God 
but man.’ Those of you who expect to 
see in Me man made perfect, surely admit 
something even more inconceivable than 
divinity itself. How do you know that 
I have not raised Myself step by step 
from the principle of man to divine re¬ 
ality? How do you know that My 
church is not My divinity? Let is suf- 


THE RE-APPEARING 59 


fice for Me to be thy God. Let it suf¬ 
fice that thou believest in Me. Know 
only whether thou canst conciliate thy 
spiritual loyalty with thy faith in Me. If 
thou canst, what dost thou forgo? Dost 
thou forgo eternal hope or thine own es¬ 
teem?” 

“Lord, Thou temptest me.” 

As he spoke the words, Narda thought, 
“Must God not make Himself Beelzebub 
to please the men of this miserable gener¬ 
ation?” 

“You discuss My parables. You pre¬ 
tend to find My doctrine in the doctrine 
of the philosophers who came before 
Me.” 

Suddenly the voice of Jesus thundered. 

“And who came before Me? The only 
light in the dreams of the philosophers 
is My eternal light. I have expunged 
their vain dreams from out of My gospel, 
and My light remains.” 

“Lord, why is Your law so hard?” 

“The law of the flesh is harder than 


60 THE RE-APPEARING 


Mine, and well you know it Is the law 
of the rich not harder, and the law of the 
strong? You utter words and hope that 
their noise may hide the emptiness of your 
spirit. Do you know the secret of your 
own desire? . . 

“Lord, in the whole of Your gospel the 
word beauty is not mentioned once.” 

“In the whole of your code is the word 
love mentioned once? And yet if law 
be not founded on the love of man, one 
for another, is it the law? In the same 
way beauty is the sign of My presence, 
but this sign is manifest, and I have not 
created man to be blind. It is only the 
philosophers and aesthetes, men of vanity, 
who babble without shame of love and 
beauty. I have not come for the aesthetes 
and the philosophers. Speak less of 
beauty. Multiply it by love.” 

“Lord, read the thought which I dare 
not express to You.” 

“Be it so. My childlike and primitive 
gospel is repugnant to modern delicacy. 


THE RE-APPEARING 61 


It is out-dated. Have you noticed that, 
such as it is, it is of passionate interest to 
the most delicate, the most refined poets, 
artists, and thinkers of your day?” 

“ ’Tis true. You are the fashion,” 
murmured Narda. 

“You forget that you will be called 
upon to render an account of all the idle 
words that fall from your lips,” said Jesus 
severely. 

Then more gently: 

“The uncultured treat Me as prim¬ 
itive. The exegetics deny Me. The wits 
jeer at Me for an uncouth miracle-work¬ 
er. But verily I say unto you, the igno¬ 
rant and the learned would be equally 
insensible to a modern version of My law, 
to a modern setting forth of My di¬ 
vinity.” 

So, with the cordiality of children Je¬ 
sus and His new disciple talked and 
sought wisdom together. Now and 
again Narda asked himself, “Am I not 
talking to myself? Is it not I alone who 


62 THE RE-APPEARING 


am asking questions and giving the an¬ 
swers? ” 

Meanwhile, at rHotel des Trois Rois, 
in which there are three hundred rooms, 
Jesus was receiving privately and at one 
and the same time, three hundred inter¬ 
viewers. Each one of them, delighted at 
not having been kept waiting, believed 
himself to be specially favoured, and 
while flattering himself that his own 
merit was the reason of this privilege, felt 
that the august Personage who was re¬ 
ceiving him had already, by His perspi¬ 
cacity, half proved His divinity. 

The public learned the result of these 
three hundred interviews in the evening 
papers of the 14th December, and more 
fully in the morning papers of the next 
day. For the Press had recovered its 
eloquence. The curious discomfort of 
the last few days had resulted in a fresh¬ 
ness and spontaneity of expression. The 
public showed passionate interest in these 


THE RE-APPEARING 63 


newspaper stories, all of which were 
spun out at great length, for the story was 
the story of the day. They were all ex¬ 
tremely well written, and their work was 
not due only to the reflection of divine 
light that was in them. The journalists 
had surpassed themselves, because uncon¬ 
sciously each one of them had drawn a 
portrait of himself in colours of glory. 
For Jesus had appeared to each of the 
journalists as a corrected and perfected 
image of himself. There is nothing new 
in the procedure, and I am not sure that 
the reason of the charm which is to be 
found in the admirable lyric effusions of 
the great mystics is not based upon con¬ 
fusion of the same kind. The believer 
realises and sees his God according to his 
own strength and his own powers. This 
subjective action of piety is to be found 
as a principle in every religion, and until 
man loses himself and becomes absorbed 
in God, God is absorbed in man. 

For these reasons the reporters found 


64 THE RE-APPEARING 


sympathetic words and tender metaphors 
to describe Jesus, and found them with¬ 
out difficulty. Their enthusiasm was sin¬ 
cere and communicative. The people of 
Paris bought up the papers, and not wait¬ 
ing to get home to read them, devoured 
these masterpieces in the street under the 
driving snow, by the light of the gas and 
the electric lamps. 

The readers who, anxious to learn 
fresh details, compared the articles in sev¬ 
eral papers, were not a little surprised to 
find considerable divergencies in fact, 
ideas, and words. In La Feuille the hair 
of Jesus was described as fair. He was 
dark in La Petite Feuille. He was red in 
Paris Feuille. His hair was black in 
UAvant-VAube, and grey in La Gaule. 
There were the same differences of opin¬ 
ion with regard to His face. His clothes, 
and what He said. His bearing was de¬ 
scribed as that of an elegant Bohemian, 
something like the painter Carolus-Du- 
ran, twenty years before he went to the 


THE RE-APPEARING 65 


Villa Medicis. It was described as that 
of a carefully and well-dressed man, as 
successful artists and poets usually are 
nowadays; as that of a German philoso¬ 
pher with rugged features; as that of a 
handsome tenor from Toulouse; as that 
of a Protestant clergyman, as Frenchmen 
understand him; as that of a warrior, 
with long hair and beard; or, this oc¬ 
curred most frequently, as that of one of 
the little figures of Christ which are to 
be seen on sale in the shops near the 
Church of St. Sulpice. 

The comparison of what He had said 
in the different papers made His words 
seem altogether incoherent, for He was 
made here to praise and there to blame 
the same people and the same acts. He 
was made to announce peace, war, the end 
of the world, the age of gold, and always 
with the same categorical assurance that 
one expects from a Sovereign Lord. 

People did not waste much time in 
pausing over these contradictions. In 


66 THE RE-APPEARING 


every heart was the unanimous wish to see 
and know Him as He was, and from 
every point of Paris the crowd made for 
La Place de I'Etoile. A flood of human 
beings poured up there with a rush such 
as has never been seen before, and never 
will be seen again. This immense crowd 
of pilgrims was in a fever of excitement. 
They did not walk. They ran. Old 
men and young men, citizens and their 
wives and daughters, of all ages and all 
walks in life, all ran toward I'Hotel des 
Trois Rois. 

But when they came to La Place de 
rStoile the crowd of thousands who had 
got there first had made a moving wall, 
which the new-comers could not pass. 
The police worked hard, but worked in 
vain to restore order, and the confusion 
was indescribable. 

Someone in the crowd had an idea. 
Who it was nobody knows. 

“If it be really He, why doesn’t He re¬ 
store order?” 


THE RE-APPEARING 67 


At the same moment, as if He had 
heard the words spoken, He appeared on 
the balcony of l^Hotel des Trots Rois 
and made a sign. Immediately, without 
a moment’s hesitation, the immense 
crowd moved on harmoniously and qui¬ 
etly, and, in perfect order, marched past 
beneath the balcony from which Jesus 
blessed the people as they passed Him. 
The crowd numbered millions. 

When Monsieur Noah, who had come 
from America to teach Parisians how to 
organise their traffic, learned of this mir¬ 
acle, he said the same words which had 
been uttered a few hours before by Mon¬ 
sieur Baunu-Llavari, the manager of the 
UAvant-l'Aube. He had read in his pa¬ 
per the announcement of Christ’s arrival. 
“I believe in God,” he said. 

The joyful crowds, when they left La 
Place de I'Etotle, rushed to the taverns 
and the cafes to testify to God’s glory. 
They suddenly remembered the hymns 
and canticles of their childhood—this 


68 THE RE-APPEARING 


was another miracle—and sang them turn 
about with the Marseillaise and Interna¬ 
tionale. They drank, they danced, they 
sang. Rejoicing went on all through the 
night. It was an improvised festival of 
the 14 th of July, the only things missing 
being the roundabouts, shooting booths, 
and fat women, which are the essential 
accessories of every really popular fes¬ 
tival. But the next day these were miss¬ 
ing no longer. 

Jesus, as He had promised, was at the 
disposal of all who came to Him, and He 
received a multitude of visitors. They 
arrived by special trains from the most 
distant parts of France, and even from 
abroad. Most of them, and this shows 
pretty clearly the state of mind of our 
contemporaries, most of them came not 
so much to consult Him, to see Him, and 
to hear His doctrine, as to make business 
proposals to Him. Or at all events the 


THE RE-APPEARING 69 


people with proposals were the first to 
come and the first to be received. 

After them came those of anxious 
hearts who wanted to know what codicil 
Jesus was going to add to the New Testa¬ 
ment. People poured in during the 
whole afternoon of the 15 th. In the 
morning Jesus received the business men 
first of all. 

The most remarkable of them was a 
professional showman, an impresario 
known the whole world over, particularly 
in North and South America. He came 
to ask Jesus to allow him to “make up a 
company and organise a tour.” He 
was an expert, he said. He brought ref¬ 
erences with him. He boasted of what he 
had done before, and declared that there 
was no doubt of success. 

“We shall make millions,” he declared. 

Jesus listened and looked at him sadly 
and in silence. The showman, whose 
mind was full of his money-making plans, 


70 THE RE-APPEARING 


went on talking ceaselessly. ^‘The first 
thing to be done is to make up the twelve 
apostles. Judas will be our chief diffi¬ 
culty, for unfortunately Renan is dead, 
and those who take his place nowadays 
have no authority. That doesn’t matter, 
however. We shall find somebody. I 
have done harder things than that, and of 
course You are going to begin all over 
again. Believe me, it would be a mis¬ 
take to waste too much time over prelim¬ 
inaries. The Temptation will be without 
popular interest, for there is no desert 
now in which to go and fast. We must 
hurry on to the Passion. Where shall it 
be, to start with? Why not in Paris? It 
would be ever so much better than Ober- 
ammergaii. . . 

Jesus let him talk. 

There were people there who had not 
yet mentioned their names, and who had 
been introduced at once because all the 
ante-rooms were filled. There were a 
number of journalists there, too, who 


THE RE-APPEARING 71 


were busily taking notes. Jesus turned 
away from the showman and looked at 
these spectators of this sacrilegious com¬ 
edy, studying on their faces the impres¬ 
sion it had made upon them. Not one of 
them manifested the horror which he 
ought to have felt. Even Narda was in¬ 
terested by the insolent volubility of this 
abominable mountebank, and Crucol was 
laughing. 

When Jesus saw that His truth did not 
shine in a single one of these poor brains. 
He sighed and raised His hand. The 
showman disappeared. 

His place was taken immediately by a 
rich contractor, who offered Jesus the 
management of the carpentry works in his 
business. ^‘That was Your trade at one 
time, wasn’t it?” 

A well-known dramatic author came to 
solicit the collaboration of the Saviour in 
a play which the Theatre Frangais had 
accepted in advance, a play of the high¬ 
est morality which would certainly re- 


72 THE RE-APPEARING 


main in the repertory. It was to be 
called rEsperance et la Charite. 

The painter, Bonnat, came to propose 
that he should paint the portrait of 
Jesus. 

“As You know,” he said, “I am the of¬ 
ficial portrait-painter of the President of 
the Republic and of the Cardinals. I 
hope You will take Your place in such 
good company.” 

But I have not the pretension to enum¬ 
erate all the people who came to trouble 
Jesus, nor will I attempt to report all the 
more or less foolish speeches to which He 
had to listen that morning. He made no 
reply to anyone. When they had spoken, 
these people went off of their own accord, 
dismissed, turned away by a mere look. 

Monsieur Jaures was the only man 
who obtained an answer, and that was a 
quotation from the old gospel. The hon¬ 
ourable deputy, in a brilliantly impro¬ 
vised speech, which the evening papers 
reproduced in extenso, begged Jesus to 


THE RE-APPEARING 73 


declare Himself openly favourable to the 
claims of the unfortunate working men 
who were exploited by shameless capital¬ 
ists. Jesus said to him: 

“The poor ye have always with you.” 

Thereupon a young woman of rare 
beauty drew from her pocket a little phial 
full of a very precious and most expen¬ 
sive perfume, and sprinkling it to the last 
drop on the feet of the Saviour, begged 
Him to let her play the part of Mary 
Magdalene. 

In the afternoon, visitors of another 
kind presented themselves. They came 
for information. They were greedy to 
know the plans of the Messiah. They 
questioned Him ceaselessly, their ques¬ 
tions coming one after the other without 
waiting for replies, and in their voice 
was a distant echo of the voice of Pilate 
and the voices of the Pharisees. 

“Are You really the Son of God?” 

“Are You the King of the Jews?” 


74 THE RE-APPEARING 


“Do You come to reconcile them?’’ 

“Do You again bring fire and war?” 

“Will You once more refuse to be our 
judge in the questions which divide us?” 

“Do You come once more to exhort us 
to be penitent?” 

“Will You repeat once more that sal¬ 
vation is difficult for those that have 
riches?” 

“Have You come to drive the money¬ 
lenders from the Temple a second time?” 

“Have You come to announce the last 
Judgment?” 

“Will You be crucified again?” 

“Will You tell us the Truth?” 

“Will You show us the Way?” 

“Will You teach us the Life?” 

The questions became more numerous, 
more pressing and more passionate. 
They rose into a moan of agony. 

“Shall we at last be told?” 

“Have we come to the end of the agony 
from which the world has suffered since 
its beginning?” 


THE RE-APPEARUSTG 75 


You tell us the Way, the Truth, 
and the Life?” 

it indeed You?” 

Jesus listened. His eyes shone with a 
light of ineffable sadness. 

Suddenly one of the questioners, speak¬ 
ing louder than the others, caused them to 
be silent. His words were mingled with 
outcries and sobs and tears. 

“Have pity! Speak to us clearly, and 
do not allow us any longer not to hear 
You. Lord, we are dying! Oh Al¬ 
mighty! who can save us, open our minds 
and touch our hearts. Master, we want 
a sign from You! A sign glorious, in¬ 
contestable, self-evident, which shall 
oblige us to believe in You. We want 

The words died suddenly on the im¬ 
ploring lips, and a shudder of fear shook 
all present, for the flame of a terrible an¬ 
ger burned in the eyes of Jesus. 

“Wicked and adulterous generation,” 
He said, “you ask for a sign and no sign 


76 THE RE APPEARING 


shall be given you. Your wish condemns 
you, for it shows your vanity, your sloth 
and your hardness of heart. You ask for 
a sign. Your wish proves your definite 
decay, for you ask me to reduce your 
minds to slavery. You feel yourselves 
unworthy to believe, incapable of de¬ 
serving certainty, and all you want is 
that I should believe for you. But I 
can no more believe for you than the 
master can have knowledge for his pupil, 
or than the wife can love for her husband. 
He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. 
The truth cannot be taught. It must be 
discovered in the words which contain it, 
and beyond them, in the words which 
enwrap and hide it. That is why the 
God of the Gospels spoke in parables. 
He spoke to the intelligence and the sin¬ 
cerity of man. You want the truth to be 
imposed upon you. You refuse to make 
the necessary effort for its acquisition, 
and you will not believe until it has be- 


THE RE APPEARING 77 


come impossible for you to deny the evi¬ 
dence. You do not ask your under¬ 
standing to testify to this evidence. You 
wish your senses to do so. You want 
to receive truth, not to look for it, to 
receive it as a material ray of light, as a 
rush of wind or as a clap of thunder. 
Hypocritical and cowardly generation! 
Not one of you shall possess the truth 
unless he has thought, in his heart, with 
all his strength. You wish to take the 
truth with your hands, to see it with your 
eyes. You have no confidence in your 
soul because you know that falsehood 
lives in it. You are like a man who, 
having been betrayed in his house by his 
wife and his children and by his servants, 
goes out upon the high road to beg his 
salvation of strangers. But strangers 
will betray him too.” 

“You at least,” said he who had asked 
for the sign, “You, Lord, do not deceive 
us. You do not tempt us. Do not re- 


78 THE RE-APPEARING 


fuse us the miracle which will awaken 
our conscience. In Judea You cured 
the sick, You raised the dead-” 

^‘Are you quite sure?” asked Jesus in a 
voice so distant, so far off, that everybody 
present asked his heart whether it was 
He who had spoken, or whether the ques¬ 
tion had formed itself in the secret re¬ 
cesses of each man’s own mind. 

He spoke again: 

“Oh ye of little faith! Corozain, 
Bethsaida and Capharnaum saw My 
miracles and did not believe. All is van¬ 
ity. The miracles of God and words 
from His Kingdom are vanity for those 
who do not see and do not listen with 
their understanding. Satan comes and 
steals away the seed which has been sown 
in careless hearts. And you who wish 
to recognise Me by a word and by a sign 
which raised the dead, you will listen 
with your ears and you will not hear. 
You will gaze with your eyes and you 
will not see, if at first you do not believe. 



THE RE-APPEARING 79 


If you believe, you yourselves will per¬ 
form miracles. You will command the 
mountains to cast themselves into the sea, 
and they will obey you.” 

A deep groan sprang from every 
breast. Men sobbed, and, in their sob¬ 
bing, words were muttered. ‘‘The par¬ 
able of merit and of mercy once again. 
You ask too much of man. If You do not 
bring us more mercy than this You 
might as well have remained in Your 
Heaven.” 

And they went off weeping with pain, 
and Jesus looked at them inexorably as 
they went. 

Narda, who had not left the Hotel 
since the morning, followed them. In 
his heart of hearts he did not approve the 
implacability of Jesus. “Why did He 
refuse the sign for which He had been 
asked? Why would He not give again, 
as He gave in the days of Herod, proofs 
of His mission? The blind see, the halt 
walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear. 


80 THE RE APPEARING 


the dead are raised up. Would it not 
have been interesting if He had re-ar¬ 
ranged with modern conditions the prin¬ 
cipal scenes in the old Gospel, multiply¬ 
ing the loaves in the plain of St. Denis, 
walking on the waters of the Seine, and 
making a triumphal entry into Versailles, 
opening the eyes of the blind, and giving 
hearing to the deaf. Of course, had He 
consented to do these things. He might 
have got Himself into trouble with the 
authorities for the illegal practice of 
medicine. Perhaps the enthusiasm of the 
crowds for His presence would have 
made the Government uneasy. Then 
there would have been a trial before the 
High Court, and the Passion would have 
begun once more in a new and modern 
way.” 

At this point Narda trembled. He 
had just remembered the words of the 
vile-minded showman, “Of course, you 
are going to begin again.” He was 
ashamed of himself. Was it possible 


THE RE-APPEARING 81 


that his thought had anything in common 
with the thoughts of such a man? 

No, Jesus did not intend to repeat, as 
an actor plays his part, the acts and the 
sayings of the Gospels. Jesus had not 
come to begin His work again or to finish 
it. Had He not Himself told Narda 
that His work had been finished for all 
eternity. And of a sudden these words 
acquired a meaning which Narda had 
not yet understood. This work, finished 
for all eternity, filled all eternity, and 
would last as long as the centuries. It 
would always be modern, always new, 
and always real. It fitted itself now to 
the modern circumstances of life, and 
that was why Jesus no longer performed 
the old-fashioned miracles, and why new 
miracles of a new kind must be expected 
from Him. 


Ill 

“LAZARUS, COME FORTH!” 

T he young girl was trembling. 
With a smile Jesus reassured her, 
and signed to her to come near. 
“What do you want of Me?” He asked. 
“Lord,” implored Marie, falling on 
her knees. “Those whom I love are in 
danger of death, and I have come to You 
to beg You to save them.” 

“Why? If I were able to save them 
should I leave them in danger of death?” 

“To show Your almighty power by 
saving them. Truly, those whom I love 
are not themselves in fear of death, but 
it would be better for them that they 
should be dead, that they should die while 
life was in them, than that they should 
remain alive while there is no longer any 
life in them.” 

“I know,” said Jesus. 

82 


THE RE-APPEARING 83 


“Lord,” said Marie again, “if You had 
remained with them my brother and my 
sister had not died.” 

Jesus went with Marie. 

She took Him to a sumptuous house in 
the Champs Elysees, an immense, mag¬ 
nificently furnished cube of buildings, the 
very aspect of which showed the spiritual 
indigence of those who lived there. Yet 
in the world’s judgment these people 
were happy. Numbers of men and 
women called on them to ask help of all 
kinds, and felt honoured by the mere fact 
of asking for their good graces. They 
had numbers of friends, or at any rate 
numbers of people pretended to be their 
friends. These were poor, too, so pain¬ 
fully poor, in such despair at their dis¬ 
tress that they did not even recognise it, 
and did not weep and gnash their teeth, 
but were condemned to wear an eternal 
smile. 

Often they visited and smiled in one 
another’s houses, trying in the vacuum of 


84 THE RE-APPEARING 


their consciences to make time pass by 
means of rich living, by exchanging 
words of doubtful wit, by gambling, and 
by every form of vice. 

That morning they had gone to smile at 
the house of the brother and sister-in-law 
of Marie. They were smiling sadly. 
There was a great luncheon forward, a 
banquet, as were all the luncheons every 
day in that poor world. And the rooms 
were filled with charming women and 
good-looking men, who smiled at one an¬ 
other inconsolably. 

In spite of the rich perfumes of those 
present, Jesus, as he entered, felt the 
odour of death in his heart, and going 
straight up to the master and the mistress 
of the house, said to them: 

^^What have ye done with it?^^ 

They did not understand His words, 
but the voice, the look, the tone of His 
voice made them fearful. His presence 
awoke in their hearts old feelings, awoke 
in them, again, their dying soul. They 


THE RE APPEARING 85 


understood, at all events, that in these 
words there was something to be under¬ 
stood. They did not dare to question Je¬ 
sus, but they turned to Marie. 

“He speaks to you,” she said, “of that 
which is no more, of the death which is 
the reason that there is no longer any life 
in you.” 

Then her brother and her sister-in-law 
trembled in every limb, for they under¬ 
stood that Jesus spoke of their love which 
they had quite forgotten, and which had 
died. They began suddenly to regret it, 
and they exchanged a rapid look, in 
which there was reproach and remorse. 
But at the same moment the husband 
grew pale and the wife blushed, for they 
feared that their feelings must have been 
guessed by their Visitor. 

^^What have ye done with it?^^ Jesus re¬ 
peated. 

He raised His hand and pointed to the 
heavy luxury of the room, to the lux¬ 
urious dresses of the women, and to their 


86 THE RE-APPEARING 


empty faces, and to the empty faces of 
the men who were with them. And 
pointing even further, His finger showed 
the offices in which business of high im¬ 
portance was transacted, the workrooms 
and the factories where men toiled for 
their masters and for all that which 
means power, ambition, pleasures, amuse¬ 
ments, and vices. It was under these 
things that these unhappy people had 
buried their hearts, in them that they had 
forgotten their life. 

Jesus spoke again. 

“What shall it profit a man if he gain 
the whole world, and suffer the loss of his 
soul?” 

The husband, caring nothing for those 
who were present, burst into tears, and 
kissed his wife, while Marie embraced 
the knees of the Saviour. 

The guests looked at this scene with 
deep emotion, for they felt their own 
souls and their own love revived within 
them. 


THE RE-APPEARING 87 


The odour of death had disappeared. 
The spirit of life was alive in the air. 

All that day, December i6th, and on 
all the days which followed until Satur¬ 
day the 24th, inexplicable things hap¬ 
pened in the town-halls of the twenty 
parishes of Paris where marriages are 
celebrated. 

In more than sixty cases out of every 
hundred, when the mayor asked the bride 
and bridegroom if they would take one 
another to be man and wife, he received, 
sometimes from the bridegroom, but 
more often from the bride, the answer 
“No,’’ spoken in clear and decided tones. 

When the astonished mayor thought 
that he had misunderstood the answer, 
and repeated his question, the brides and 
bridegrooms threw on to the green table, 
which is the altar of the civil marriage 
ceremony, their wedding rings which 
they had twisted off their fingers. 

According to his nature, the bride- 


88 THE RE APPEARING 


groom whom his bride had put away be¬ 
fore the marriage burst into reproaches, 
into bitter complaints, or tears; shouted 
with angry indignation, or begged her to 
reconsider her reply, but always in vain. 
Sometimes it was the bride who stormed 
or pleaded. The other party always re¬ 
fused to reconsider his or her “No,” and 
“No” was his or her last word. 

It must be said that commonsense, na¬ 
ture and virtue were in full agreement 
with these negatives. For in every case 
the union was a disproportionate one. 
Disproportionate either because of the 
conditions of the marriage and the tem¬ 
perament of bride and bridegroom, or of 
their ages. A beautiful and poor young 
girl refused to marry a rich old man. 
This was the most usual case. But there 
were examples, too, of young men who 
refused to marry elderly dowagers with 
fat purses. 

The extraordinary thing about these 
refusals was that they were always made 


THE RE APPEARING 89 


at the last moment. The fathers and 
mothers-in-law complained bitterly in 
every case that they ought to have been 
spared the shame and the pain of this 
insult. 

“Why,” they said, “should things have 
been allowed to go so far, and then at the 
last moment . . .” 

In every case the bride or bridegroom 
who refused to marry declared that their 
determination had been as sudden as it 
was irresistible. Each one of them de¬ 
clared that “yes” had been the word upon 
their lips as they had crossed the thresh¬ 
old of the town-hall, “but when the 
mayor asked the question it was more 
than I could resist.” 

Some of them even said: 

“I had opened my mouth to say, ^Yes,’ 
when I saw behind the mayor a Man, a 
handsome and sad Man, looking at me. 
And His gaze made the lie impossible.” 

Nobody could mistake the Personality 
referred to, and it was these little family 


90 THE RE-APPEARING 


dramas that caused the first use of the 
word “inconvenient,” with reference to 
the presence of Jesus in Paris. 

The mayors tried to keep Him out of 
the town-halls, and had the doors care¬ 
fully guarded on the days when mar¬ 
riages were celebrated. Numbers of 
well-known and respected people were 
obliged to show their papers at the wed¬ 
dings of their sons and daughters to prove 
that they were not the Saviour. But He 
was always present, and always passed 
in unseen. 

From the third day onwards He need 
not have troubled. The peculiar probity, 
which made all unmarried persons re¬ 
fuse to profane the sacrament of marriage 
by an assent which was contrary to their 
real wish, had become a fever, an illness, 
a mania, an epidemic, like suicide or 
murder. 

Engaged couples who hoped for no 
happiness from a marriage which had 
been arranged by foolish or greedy rela- 


THE RE APPEARING 91 


tives, realised their liberty of action at 
the decisive moment. They realised 
their dignity, and proudly, gaily, brightly 
spoke the “No” which set them free. 

There were no more of these ill-as¬ 
sorted unions which a third person inevi¬ 
tably breaks. The number of marriages 
diminished, no doubt, because imposture 
no longer swelled the tale, but all the 
marriages which did take place were so 
charming, so delightful, that the scien¬ 
tists who investigated the laws regulating 
the structure of society, announced a com¬ 
ing increase in the Paris birth-rate. 

On the 14 th December a popular fes¬ 
tival had begun almost of its own accord, 
and this went on with great success, in 
spite of circumstances which might have 
hindered it. For there had been a most 
unusual falling off of business on the 
Bourse for several weeks, and this had 
become more accentuated every day, 
bringing in its wake the ruin of the ma- 


92 THE RE APPEARING 


jority of the big business firms in Paris. 
General business had come practically to 
a standstill. 

The result of this was lamentable mis¬ 
ery in the poorer districts, and under the 
circumstances the misery was irremedi¬ 
able. 

How, in such circumstances, could the 
working classes, workers who had become 
honest and honourable citizens since their 
pilgrimage to La Place de I'Etoile, for¬ 
get their wives and children who were 
starving, in riotous festival in fairs and 
taverns? 

The explanation of the mystery was 
not supernatural intervention. The in¬ 
tervention came from above, but not from 
Heaven. The Government and the Mu¬ 
nicipal Council, growing uneasy at the 
march of events, feared that the worst 
kind of riot, an uprising of hungry men, 
would complicate the financial crisis. 
For this reason they had distributed, in 
secret, large sums of money among the 


THE RE-APPEARING 98 


publicans and cafe proprietors, so that 
they should give credit to their customers 
for several days. 

The pleasure-mongers in the fairs had 
also received a subvention, and every 
open place in Paris had become a fair. It 
was necessary that the people should 
amuse themselves, for when there is 
amusement there is no danger. The 
Kermesse grew and throve in an extraor¬ 
dinary way. 

As they had no bread at home, the 
women came out to the fair with their 
husbands, dragging their children with 
them. And the people of Paris rejoiced 
in all respectability, men, women, and 
children together, although the free dis¬ 
tribution of drink began to act upon the 
weaker minds. 

But alcohol is always dangerous. 

On the 17 th, just after dinner-time, 
when more drink than food had been 
consumed, the excitement became gen¬ 
eral. As minutes followed on the heels 


94 THE RE-APPEARING 


of minutes, and drink upon the heel of 
drink, the effervescence grew. Men and 
women reeled in their walk and stag¬ 
gered, began dancing and stopped half¬ 
way in their dance, shouted ribald songs 
and mingled them with hymns and 
psalms. Here and there a quarrel oc¬ 
curred. Every young man paid too 
much attention to the wives and sisters 
of the married men. And in this sea of 
wild excitement the children ran here and 
there, pushed about and hustled, fright¬ 
ened, sobbing, looking for their mothers, 
knocked down at times and trampled un¬ 
derfoot, crying with fatigue and hunger. 
Suddenly a cry arose: 

“To bed with the women and chil¬ 
dren!” 

Everybody agreed at once, and re¬ 
echoed the shout. The women them¬ 
selves, in whom the feeling of mother¬ 
hood awoke again, approved of the idea, 
and gathering the children up, without 
saying goodbye to the men, went off, sup- 


THE RE-APPEARING 95 


ported by their little ones as much as lead¬ 
ing them; went off to their cold beds and 
empty bread-baskets at home. 

When they had gone, quarrels were 
being settled over a few last drinks, when 
the voice, the same voice, perhaps, which 
had given such good advice before, 
shrieked aloud a call to sudden madness. 
A wild, inarticulate frenzied clamour 
echoed the shout, and then, in gangs, this 
drunken crowd rolled off in sullen silence 
towards the lowest haunts of pleasure in 
the city, towards the red lanterns which 
glimmered in sinister vulgarity in the 
dark side streets. 

And the impossible occurred. 

At the very moment when each one of 
the groups paused in front of the door of 
disgrace, at the very moment when this 
door opened to them, there passed be¬ 
tween the crowd of waiting men and the 
half-opened door, slowly, smilingly ra¬ 
diant, a pair of true lovers with their 
arms around one another. Perhaps they 


96 THE RE-APPEARING 


were those who had been married that 
same day, those who would have said 
‘‘No” to the mayor if they had not known 
themselves to be united by true love, even 
before they had made declaration to the 
world of their wish to live and die to¬ 
gether. And, as they saw them, the men 
stepped back, dazzled, sobered, and 
touched. They fell back. Their mem¬ 
ories fell back as well as their bodies, and 
with a frightened gesture of disgust they 
wiped from their minds the idea of the 
vulgar pleasure which awaited them be¬ 
yond those open doors, remembering, 
each one of them, the day when he was 
like the young man who had passed, 
happy as he was, half-way like him to 
Heaven on the wings of delicious dreams, 
trembling with joy at the weight on his 
shoulder of the woman who was to be the 
mother of his children. They fell back 
and they fled, listening to no appeal from 
those shameful thresholds, fled to their 
memories and to new hopes, fled to the 


THE RE-APPEARING 97 


little home which was quite large enough 
to hold much happiness. 

Next morning, from each of the houses, 
which are tolerated by the Government, 
charges against “a person or persons un¬ 
known” were sent to the Home Office. 
No notice was taken of them officially, 
but at the Cabinet Council, which was 
held that day, there was some talk of these 
complaints, and the members of the Cab¬ 
inet exchanged views as to the measures 
which sooner or later they might be com¬ 
pelled to take against X—the Person un¬ 
known. 

These things and others, for it is im¬ 
possible to chronicle all that happened, 
were told in the newspapers at length, 
but without comment. The managers of 
the Paris papers had agreed to adopt this 
tone in speaking of Jesus. They were 
beginning to share the general uneasi¬ 
ness, which had some foundation, and was 
really serious. They were beginning to 


98 THE RE-APPEARING 


ask one another how long this state of 
things would last. They refused to be¬ 
lieve that it could be permanent and defi¬ 
nite, for that would have been the end of 
everything, and things were going very 
badly as it was. 

As to the explanation of the “No” 
itself, that might be explained later when 
it could be treated as past history. To 
inquisitive women and children who 
asked for an explanation of the wonder, 
people replied with a sceptical smile 
which showed that they did not believe 
their own words: 

“It is a whim of God.” 

However, the whim was not a passing 
one, and the serious minded whispered to 
themselves, as Tribulat Bonhomet did 
when he looked at the stars: 

“Will all this never come to an end?” 

In Paris, days count as hours, or (when 
public curiosity is over-excited by phe¬ 
nomena of which the cleverest under- 


THE RE-APPEARING 99 


stand nothing), as centuries, and that was 
the case now. 

The “White Leprosy,” as the journal¬ 
ists had called the constantly growing 
blank spaces in the daily papers, had be¬ 
come a sort of disease which was under¬ 
mining the habits and customs of the cap¬ 
ital. Paris was becoming astoundingly 
honest and excruciatingly honourable. 

Contrary to all logic, contrary to all 
likelihood, contrary to all possibility, 
public virtue and public poverty grew 
simultaneously. It was less like a mir¬ 
acle than like madness. The psycholo¬ 
gists declared it to be a new form of 
moral epidemic, and a terribly contagious 
one, too, against which there was no 
known remedy. 

On the 18 th December it was noticed 
that five days had passed without the 
declaration of a single real crime at the 
Police Prefecture or at the police sta¬ 
tions. The Law Courts had nothing to 


100 THE RE-APPEARING 


do. There were a few small cases of 
quarrels in the street, cases of vagabond¬ 
age, and the like, but the judges always 
acquitted the prisoners. 

In the street people went about calmly 
and smiling affably, and even cordially to 
one another, struggling with one another 
for the right to step down into the road¬ 
way to let one another pass. 

The shopkeepers were scrupulously 
honest, superstitiously honest. They 
would have preferred a heavy loss to the 
slightest gain to which they had no real 
right, but they found little use for this 
new virtue. For there were no more 
customers, or hardly any now, and their 
establishments were empty. This, in 
spite of their newly-attained purity of 
spirit, annoyed the shopkeepers consider¬ 
ably. 

It was a period of apotheosis in the his¬ 
tory of women. Politeness, which had 
been somewhat neglected in Paris for 
some time past, grew up again both in the 


THE RE-APPEARING 101 


streets and in the drawing-rooms. The 
exquisite gallantry, the respectful, almost 
religious, politeness which had been the 
loveliest flower of France’s garden in old 
times, blossomed into being once again 
under the sunshine of French women’s 
smiles, and men delighted in it, finding 
there another charm in life. 

This revival of politeness was perhaps 
the only wholly pleasant thing which 
characterised these extraordinary days, 
significant, as it was, of truth and nature 
in its fullness and its grace. In all other 
shapes which honour and honesty put on 
or pretended to put on, there was a more 
or less marked touch, a more or less de- 
cipherably false note of artificial heroism 
which could not possibly last. 

But with all the poetry of logic, this 
adoration of womanhood was a direct re¬ 
sult of the curious elevation of the feel¬ 
ings of everybody, an elevation caused, 
whether people believed in it or not, by 
the mysterious presence of Incarnate God 


102 THE RE APPEARING 


in the bosom of a woman. Although 
His mother was not known this time, the 
touching legend grew up again around 
Him, and glorified every mother, for it 
recalled to every man the holy dignity 
of motherhood, the source of all life. 
And this purified gallantry acquired a 
touch of mysticism, and found once again 
the delicate tinge of Gothic tenderness 
which worshipped the human image of 
divine grace in the grace of woman, and 
which dedicated the finest cathedrals in 
France to the Virgin. 

Who knows what masterpieces of art, 
what works of modern genius this state 
of mind might have brought into being if 
it had only lasted? But almost from the 
beginning it was constrained and para¬ 
lysed by a dull exasperation, which every 
mind capable of reflection felt to be 
growing. For every thinking man knew 
that the reforms which were being ac¬ 
complished in violence and in silence be¬ 
fore their eyes were, and would always 


THE RE-APPEARING 103 


be, quite incompatible with the essential 
and constituted elements of humanity as 
the centuries have formed it. They were 
quite incompatible with man’s strength 
and weakness, with his virtues, and with 
his vices. Nothing could harm human¬ 
ity now more than absolute honour and 
absolute honesty. Man’s whole life 
dwelt on compromise, on interests which 
counterbalanced. The uncompromising 
conception of Jesus was naively homi¬ 
cidal. Society could not resist one single 
year of such a state of things. It must 
bring about the total downfall of society. 

These thoughts and ideas which were 
formulated in the minds of a few think¬ 
ing men with clearness, haunted the 
minds of everybody, more or less. And 
in most minds they smothered all desire 
for holiness. 

And it must not be forgotten, too, that 
there was poverty, and that the poverty 
was growing every moment. The mystic 
and joyous heroism which was sustaining 


104 THE RE APPEARING 


the people of Paris, must break down 
sooner or later under the pressure of ne¬ 
cessity. And then what would happen? 

Face to face with this danger the 
Government did its best. Every member 
agreed spontaneously to make personal 
sacrifice for the general interest. There 
were acts of devotion on all sides. Many 
of those who yielded to a generous im¬ 
pulse and came to the help of the State 
were, in their hearts, astonished at their 
own initiative. Without knowing it they, 
too, were infected. They, like everybody 
else, were ill with the disease of honesty. 

There is no need to say that the news¬ 
papers did not escape the disease. They 
remained prudently reserved, on the de¬ 
fensive, one might almost say, waiting, 
not without impatience, for ‘‘this state of 
things” to finish, and with no illusions on 
the chances of success of Jesus and His 
effort. 

And the journalists, after having been 
flattered because Jesus had made Him- 


THE RE APPEARING 105 


self known through them in the first place, 
had begun to suffer from the crushing 
competition with Him. 

He was the only topic people cared to 
read about. Politics, aviation, science, 
letters, art, none of these things mattered 
to the readers of the papers since His 
coming. They only glanced at the pa¬ 
pers to learn what He had said or done 
the day before, or what He was going to 
say or do on the next day. There was no 
interest in anything but Him. The ordi¬ 
nary events of real life, all fiction, too, 
had lost their interest, and people were 
bored to death now in all the theatres, 
which had become uncompromisingly 
modest. Life, in fact, was becoming dull, 
in spite of the fair which the Government 
maintained at great expense on the out¬ 
side boulevards, in spite of the triumph of 
virtue, in spite of the reign of woman¬ 
hood, even in spite of the heavy clouds 
on the horizon. 

“He has deceived us,” declared Crucol 


106 THE RE-APPEARING 


to his comrades one day at La Louie 

UOr, 

“ ’Tis true,” said Frene. “I expected 
something better. He has sent us stum¬ 
bling into morality as old women in the 
country stumble into piety.” 

“We may be mistaken,” said Narda. 
“We may be understanding Him quite 
wrongly.” 

“Then why doesn’t He speak more 
clearly?” 

“No,” said somebody else. “There is 
no need for Him to speak at all. Let 
Him do something.” 

“You don’t mean to suggest that He’s 
done nothing,” exclaimed Narda. “He’s 
changed every condition in our existence, 
without even the help of the Disciples 
and The Seventy. It’s come to a point 
where . . 

“Where life has become impossible,” 
Larrivc interrupted. “He’s doing too 
much and He’s not doing enough. He’s 
doing too much to allow us to doubt, and 


THE RE-APPEARING 107 


not enough to make things clear to us. 
And He’s double-sided. His virtue en¬ 
genders wickedness; His honour and 
honesty produce poverty and pain for 
us.” 

“Yes,” said Narda. “It’s quite logical 
that order should exasperate disorder. 
They enter into conflict, and one of the 
two must yield.” 

“And which will yield in your 
opinion?” 

“Why, order, of course,” said Narda. 


IV 


A PARISIAN NICODEMUS 

N ARDA lived in the shadow of 
Jesus. 

Sometimes he felt his mind 
clear and saw distinctly. Sometimes he 
was dazzled to the point of blindness, and 
his days and nights were consumed in 
cruel alternatives of happy certainty and 
of despair. The troubles of his spirit 
wearied his body. During these days of 
fever he grew thin and strangely pale. 
His friends became anxious about him. 

And yet he had rare and intermittent 
moments of extreme lucidity, during 
which he took counsel with his conscience, 
and realised that he was himself the 
reason of his mental trouble because he 
was divided against himself. But he 
understood that his mental trouble was 
the condition of his salvation, and he be- 
108 


THE RE-APPEARING 109 


gan to see the meaning of the words 
^^Sickness is the natural state of the Chris¬ 
tian 

“At all events,’’ he told himself, “it 
is the natural state of the Christian who 
is not certain of his heart and of his 
understanding. Am I of good will? 
Am I ready to do and to suffer, and do I 
really know what He requires of me?” 

He answered himself at once, and de¬ 
spair cast down his spirit. 

“I know what He wants, but I don’t 
know what I want myself. The best 
thing about me is that I suffer from both 
my knowledge and my ignorance. The 
saddest thing about me is that I have no 
esteem either for myself or for the men 
who breathe the breath of life with me, 
for all of us are making death of life.” 

One evening when he was sorrowfully 
thinking over these things alone in his 
room, a trembling came upon him, and in 
a voice which he himself did not recog¬ 
nise he cried aloud: 


110 THE RE-APPEARING 


“ That is what He has come to tell us! 
That’s it. It is that we must return to 
life! It is that we must be born again! 
We have known it for a long time, and 
if we have not yet made the effort which 
He has asked us to make, it is because we 
are incapable of ever making it.” 

He pondered and then shook his head. 

“ No, we are not sure of it any longer. 
We are no longer sure of anything. We 
have forgotten. We are shrouded in 
darkness. The immense multitude of 
mankind has ceased even to suffer from 
its lack of faith, from its lack of God, 
from its soullessness. False Messiahs in 
their wisdom have taught us that this is 
the best thing for us, that there is no belief 
and no hope. Life is directionless, it has 
no enthusiasms. All is certain misfor¬ 
tune and dangerous pleasure. And yet 
we are not asked to humble ourselves in 
the least before this miserable perspective. 
Nothing has been done for us. Man is 
a mere consequence of the workings of 


THE RE-APPEARING 111 


nature, not their goal. And yet man 
must consider himself capable of in¬ 
definite perfection. He must pass the 
wonders of the world through the sieve 
of his reason. He must observe, must 
make experiments, must deduce, must 
feel certain that each day he will find the 
solution of at least one of life’s innumer¬ 
able mysteries. Has he not declared al¬ 
ready, ‘Henceforth the world is devoid 
of mystery.’ 

“How contradictory it all is. The 
same wise men who ask us to work with¬ 
out ceasing ‘until the end,’ Taine for ex¬ 
ample, warn us, too, that this ‘end’ (not 
the end of each of us but that of our 
terrestrial universe) is very near—that 
the days of the earth-machine are num¬ 
bered. Then, why all this labour? We 
know that the series of mysteries is in¬ 
finite, and that our undefined perfection 
will be roughly interrupted. The use¬ 
lessness of all effort is evident. The only 
wise thing to do would be to play dom- 


112 THE RE-APPEARING 


inoes. But Jesus has also told us that 
^Heaven and earth will pass away, but 
My Words will never pass away.’ He 
has told us, too, that nothing shall remain 
hidden, that everything shall be known, 
shall be revealed, and He has told us that 
we are capable of perfection, not to-mor¬ 
row, but immediately. ‘Be ye therefore 
perfect, even as your Father which is in 
Heaven is perfect’ Even as God is per¬ 
fect! Have we then the divine capacity? 
What a temptation! It is as though He 
said, ‘Ye shall be gods!’ He is God and 
Beelzebub!” 

Narda trembled, then smiled at him¬ 
self for having dared to think these things 
and to use such an expression. 

“What does it matter since we are lost? 
For we are lost beyond redemption, and 
not even He Himself can save us. The 
conditions of our thought forbid Him the 
violent intervention which would dis¬ 
honour and destroy our humanity. Per¬ 
haps he performed miracles in the old 


THE RE-APPEARING 113 


days. I hardly know. But I know that 
to-day we should not believe in them. 
We should say to the miracle-monger 
who raised the dead, Tt is true that in 
our present state of knowledge we cannot 
explain this phenomenon, but there are 
many other phenomena which could not 
be explained ten centuries ago, or even a 
hundred years ago, of which we now 
know the causes and effects perfectly well. 
Return again a little later. Lord, and we 
will answer You.’ Between the Creator 
and His creatures all communication has 
really been interrupted. We refuse to 
believe. The romance of divinity is 
ended. We have read the last page of it; 
it has not interested us. God, the Devil! 
How old these words are now. How su¬ 
perannuated, how faded!” 

Narda clenched his hands. 

“And yet,” he said, “I know quite well 
what He demands of us, and I know quite 
well that there is nothing to be done but 
just exactly that which He commands us 


114 THE RE-APPEARING 


to do. He asks us to cease from being 
dead men, and to live. That is to say, 
he bids us suffer. For perpetual suffer¬ 
ing is the only life. He asks us to be 
heroes, saints, gods. To be perfect every 
day and all day unceasingly. It is not 
reasonable, and yet—and yet He helps us. 
He prays for us. He holds out His hand 
and we see the best among us rise to an¬ 
swer Him. That ought to impress every 
man who is capable of reflection. He 
told me so the night I met Him, and I 
had already thought about it. Those 
who have eyes to see, see Him; those who 
have ears to hear, hear Him. He comes 
back to us constantly. He never leaves us. 
What is happening now is not excep¬ 
tional in any way. All that He wants is 
to force all of us, the least thoughtful of 
us, to perceive the perpetual miracle 
which is at the root of ordinary life, 
which gives it a meaning. Why should 
we not all admit the truth of what we 
all can see? Why should we obstinately 


THE RE-APPEARING 115 


refuse to be happy? Why am I so un¬ 
conquerably certain that He has come in 
vain? Why should we all reply to Him, 
‘We cannot’?’’ 

He shook his head gently. A broken¬ 
hearted smile twisted up his mouth. 

“It is absolutely true. We cannot. 
We never shall be able. He may say 
what He likes, His law is too hard. Be¬ 
sides, He thinks too highly of us. Is it 
our pride which protests against the all 
too glorious image of ourselves which He 
presents to us? Then our pride would 
really be modesty, and man would be re¬ 
calling God to moderation, to the true 
sense of proportion. We cannot accept 
the idea of perfection. We cannot con¬ 
sent to the sacrifice. The life of individ¬ 
uals and social life are both of them 
founded upon interest and pleasure 
alone. And if all is to disappear, let 
us hasten, let us enjoy our lives and the 
world.” 

Narda’s eyes were filled with tears. 


116 THE RE-APPEARING 


“How can we refrain from adoring the 
world? I hate the men of science for a 
thousand terrible reasons, among others 
because they declare coldly that the 
world must perish, and all religions are 
in agreement with the men of science on 
that point. That is why I am afraid of 
the gods and of God. Are not living 
forms the signs of living truth? Will 
this handwriting disappear as our eyes 
close? Is there only one immortal word. 
Death? There is no logical solution to 
the conflict of those who love life and 
those who love death. It is quite natural 
that the heirs of the magnificent plastic 
idea of antiquity should have persecuted, 
tortured, and killed Nature’s enemies. 
They poisoned humanity. Nietzsche has 
reason on his side. It is impossible that 
beauty should be evil, that beauty should 
have been created only to test our virtue. 
The admiration which we cannot help but 
feel for it, makes us greater, strengthens 
us, makes us purer. Our gift of admira- 


THE RE APPEARING 117 

tion, of understanding, of enjoyment, puts 
us in possession of everything, multiplies 
our soul. The landscapes with their rich 
line and the harmony of their shades live 
within us, think and love within us, add 
their own lives to ours. The form of 
eternity is written in a woman’s breast. 
And how great is the virtue of admira¬ 
tion! The joy of being admired makes 
beautiful creatures more beautiful still, 
just as the joy of being understood makes 
genius greater yet, as the joy of being 
loved multiplies the power of loving a 
hundredfold in every lover. Oh, the 
miracle of eyes which reflect one another, 
mirrors which mingle their reflections and 
their brightness, and in mingling, exalt 
them! Oh, this exchange of two great 
soaring bursts of tenderness which, en¬ 
riched one by the other, raise the heart 
above all human barriers! T love you 
because you are beautiful.’ T love you 
because your love exalts my beauty.’ 
This dialogue is the true reality of our 


118 THE RE APPEARING 


life. It is the true divinity. It is Na¬ 
ture, and there is no other.” 

Of a sudden, Narda remembered that 
some theologians proved the existence of 
God by the splendours of Nature, and he 
said to himself that this proof might be¬ 
fore long become an immediate fact. For 
it satisfies and reconciles the pagan and 
the Christian instinct, which have no 
doubt always worked together in the soul 
of man, but which in our time have 
attained an intensity and a sharpness un¬ 
known till now, although neither of the 
two has allowed itself to be wiped out by 
the other or has consented to yield to it. 
Nobody can deny that the mysticism of 
the priests has always borrowed its most 
precious resources from eternal beauty, 
and with it has composed the master¬ 
pieces of religious art of the Middle Ages, 
which are the most glorious marvels of 
our history. And will the doctors, while 
they baptise all Nature and exploit it for 
the benefit of dogma, continue telling us 


THE RE-APPEARING 119 


that Nature is the domain of the Evil 
One, and that all its beauties are pitfalls 
for the unwary? There is a complete 
contradiction between the law of Nature 
and the law of revelation, but what is 
revelation when compared with Nature? 
How constant Nature is, and how reassur¬ 
ing because of this same constancy! Na¬ 
ture never contradicts herself. The 
clouds are in harmony with the trees. 
Fauna and flora are logically and recip¬ 
rocally dependent upon one another. 
The sea and the wind, the shadow and 
the light obey the same invariable laws, 
and count the throbs of the earth’s great 
heart. Revelation is capricious. It hes¬ 
itates and is full of dark places. 

And Narda, whose steps precocious 
curiosity had led into the libraries, re¬ 
membered certain startling contradic¬ 
tions between the inspired texts of the 
Bible and the arguments brought up 
against it by exponents during centuries 
of sincere and laborious research. There 


120 THE RE-APPEARING 


is no need any longer to prove the historic 
fragility, the philosophical and moral 
fragility of the texts. It has caused, and 
will always cause, a number of defections 
in the Church of which many have been 
famous. But one phenomenon is at least 
as startling as that of these defections. It 
is the phenomenon of the conversions 
which are as countless as the defections 
have been. Priests desert the Christian 
flag, and poets, artists, and even scien¬ 
tists, enrol themselves beneath it. Faith 
seems to change its whereabouts without 
suffering any decided loss, either in the 
number or in the quality of the faithful, 
for the value of the new volunteers under 
the banner is as great as that of those 
who leave it. These individual storms of 
conscience, therefore, provide no argu¬ 
ment either for or against. 

His mind dwelt on dangerous suppo¬ 
sitions, which seemed to him of great im¬ 
portance at the moment. He wondered 
whether this hesitancy of text, this vague- 


THE RE APPEARING 121 


ness of outline, were not intentional and 
necessary. Why could not God have en¬ 
franchised or disinherited human condi¬ 
tions by means of what was written? 
Supposing we admit the pretensions of 
the evangelists to inspiration? Where 
does inspiration begin, and where does it 
end? To what extent does the partici¬ 
pation of the writers in divine knowledge 
raise them above the purely human 
sphere? May we not accept the supposi¬ 
tion that their infallibility remains sta¬ 
tionary on the frontier lines of dogma? 
For the recital of facts has only the 
authority of the memory, not even of 
Mark or of Matthew, but just of the 
so-called first witnesses who, after all, are 
capable of every error of exaggeration 
and forgetfulness. As in the case of 
everything that Jesus did, or that His 
historians say that He did, they leave our 
wills free to believe or to deny, so that our 
faith may have some merit. This explains 
the discrepancies of the stories. Logic- 


122 THE RE APPEARING 


ally, even if we admit that none of them 
be marked with the divine approval, does 
it not appear that the Church would have 
kept to one single story, if only to pre¬ 
vent countless discussions which must 
undermine its authority? In not denying 
them, did it act aimlessly? We are as¬ 
sured that the apocryphal writings are of 
the same value as the authentic gospels, 
which same were chosen at haphazard. 
We are assured that not one of their sup¬ 
posed authors is really he who has been 
named to us. What difference does that 
make? Four texts which agreed abso¬ 
lutely would be as absurd as a material 
and brutal miracle. The broad differ¬ 
ences of the gospels trace for us, and 
measure out a margin on which we may, 
if we so wish, refuse to write the word 
“Credo.” 

At this point in his meditations, which 
were intense and almost painful, Narda 
felt that he was fainting, that he was los¬ 
ing consciousness, that he was falling 


THE RE-APPEARING 123 


asleep with eyes wide open. And in this 
morbid state he had a dream that was as 
strange as it was beautiful. 

In the twilight of the day, in the gar¬ 
den of the Bible, in the midst of the 
glorious luxuriance of Eden, amid lawns 
of beautifully clear, deep colours, of 
foliage tinted like the flowers, of flowers 
which were the smiles of the earth, three 
old men stood, quite motionless, upon a 
little hill. Although the dreamer could 
not see the limits of this garden of Para¬ 
dise, he imagined them to be in the misty 
distance, knowing that this place of en¬ 
chantment was the centre and the summit 
of all things. In the distance, in the 
shadow, lay the world. In the distance 
and the shadow the nations struggled. 
One of the three Magi raised his right 
hand, and it was luminous in the twilight. 
Rays of light streamed from each one of 
the five fingers, throwing out luminous 
pyramids, of which each one of the five 
fingers was the apex, and each pyramid 


124 THE RE APPEARING 


of light lit up one of the five parts of 
the world. Continents and islands, with 
their towns, fields, forests, mountains, and 
seas, were lit up clearly now. Narda 
could see them move and roll, and almost 
thought he heard the noise of them. The 
Wise Man of the East pronounced a few 
words in a language of metallic resonance, 
then dropped his hand into the shadow. 
The garden disappeared, with the world, 
with the continents, and with the seas. 

Slowly out of the mist in which all 
things and living beings vanished, there 
sprang a town. It was a town of gold, 
a happy town, the brilliant stones of 
which were baking in the sunshine. A 
town of open spaces limited to the reach 
of the human voice in its normal meas¬ 
ure in hours of serenity. A town of little 
narrow streets which climbed winding up 
the hillside. The little hill which hung 
over the city was dotted with buildings 
of exquisite grandeur. Their grandeur 
lay in the measured moderation of their 


THE RE-APPEARING 125 


proportions, for they were little temples 
each one of which contained a goddess or 
a god. But it was man who filled the 
town. All round him the divinities from 
the temples peopled the atmosphere with 
brilliant images. Man came and went 
among them, surrounded by them, but in 
no way constrained. Sometimes he spoke 
to them, sometimes he listened as they 
told him of what he had been thinking. 
His thought was not his own. It was 
that of his ancestors from time immemo¬ 
rial, that of the heroes of his race. He 
only asked for its oracular expression at 
those moments when some enchanting 
novelty threatened antique tradition. 
This constant presence of the past made 
the future more certain. Man knew that 
he had sprung from the divinity, but he 
was mad enough to think that he could 
become greater by moving away from it, 
by trying to surpass it. He started with 
an absolute denial of all possibility of 
progress. He made up his own mind. 


126 THE RE-APPEARING 


to his own dignity, and conceived it in 
the invariable shape of divine dignity. 
The Greek heard without ceasing advice 
for his return to the perfection of the 
Greek gods, and the priests, the poets, and 
the artists maintained their secret mission 
of preaching its maintenance so that the 
town, built on this model, should also 
remain faithful to itself. 

So man lived on among the innumer¬ 
able gods, innumerably and infinitely dif¬ 
ferent. Their brilliant images sur¬ 
rounded him like constellations outside 
his life, but of which his life was the 
centre. He opened his arms and touched 
them to prove to himself his peaceful 
mastery of Nature, a Nature of which the 
gods were the multiple and harmonious 
souls, and the gods and man made a free 
and flexible alliance in the interests of 
human happiness. 

Little by little the dusk of evening fell 
upon this enchanted town. There was 
still a touch of light upon the height of 


THE RE-APPEARING 127 


the acropolis. But the streets and squares 
were filled with shadow and with melan¬ 
choly. Then night gathered upon the hill, 
and a great sea of darkness rolled over 
the entire town. 

The garden appeared a second time. 
There was no change there, and the three 
Kings were standing motionless as ever 
on the little hill. The second of them 
raised his hand. The five portions of the 
world were flooded with pyramids of 
light, and the tumult of life was visible 
again. And as before some words were 
spoken, the night dropped, and the garden 
disappeared into the darkness, with the 
world, the continents, and the seas. Out 
of this darkness rose a new town. It was 
not as the first one had been, a happy town 
in the glory of the rich rays of an eastern 
sun. It was a hard, forbidding, and im¬ 
perious town. The gazer saw violent 
contrasts with the first, among its monu¬ 
ments, and among its people. It seemed 
as though one period of salvation had 


128 THE RE-APPEARING 


just finished and as though another were 
beginning. Some of the people remained 
faithful to the past. The two parties 
were hostile one to the other, and faced 
one another, threatening. There were 
ruins which showed that it was the mor¬ 
row of a great disaster. And yet this 
young world, which had been born in 
mourning, was powerful already and had 
full consciousness of its strength. But it 
did not look either to Nature or to itself 
for joy and glory. It looked beyond, per¬ 
petually beyond, and in the distance every 
man gazed at one immutable Being, who 
was his God. With this God, who had 
become a foreigner to the elements which 
He Himself had created, men lived face 
to face in tragic meditation, disturbed in 
turn by spasms of love and cries of terror. 
God remained outside man, but did not 
manifest Himself to his senses or come 
into his life by means of oracles and 
prodigies. He summoned His faithful to 
the life that was to come, and they saw 


THE RE-APPEARING 129 


nothing in their destiny but the returning 
path to this God who was quite inaccess¬ 
ible as yet, the road to Whom was dan¬ 
gerous, rising steeply and precipitously, 
to an invisible end. Many went along it 
backwards, carrying flowers in their hand 
and singing songs; but mingled with their 
cries of joy one could hear the vibration 
of despair, and in their laughter there was 
gnashing of teeth. 

And for the second time night drank 
up the scene. 

And for the third time the three Wise 
Men appeared, standing upon the little 
hill in the garden. But the sleeper 
waited and looked in vain for the third 
Wise Man to raise his hand. It seemed 
to him, however, that his greedy gaze met 
the gaze of the old man, and that he read 
in his eyes what might have happened, 
what, no doubt, would have happened if 
this third King, as the other two had done, 
had made the sign which draws the world 
out of the darkness into day. 


130 THE RE-APPEARING 


Narda awoke. 

His dream was present in his thoughts, 
and he lived it again and penetrated its 
true meaning. He murmured to himself, 
“This is the third, the last phase of the 
history of God. He began by surround¬ 
ing and protecting us with His plastic 
ubiquity. Then He drew nearer, becom¬ 
ing One, and offered to live with each 
one of us in terrible and entrancing soli¬ 
tude. Now He comes nearer still. He 
wants to live in us, but wants to disap¬ 
pear, to mingle His own life with ours 
so that there shall no longer be man and 
his God, but man who is God. Is this 
whatwemean when we stammer the word 
‘progress’? Is this the deep hidden mean¬ 
ing of the Eucharist? Arc we on the 
brink of a new period of Christian sal¬ 
vation? But when will the third Wise 
Man make the necessary gesture with his 
hand? What is he waiting for? Does 
he not know that we can do no more? 
The Pharisees said so to Jesus a few days 


THE RE-APPEARING 131 


ago. Evil is eating us up and we have no 
strength for righteousness. Oh, my God! 
will good triumph over evil? Alas! we 
do not even know what is good and what 
is evil. We do not even know if there 
be good and evil. Yet He knows. Per¬ 
haps the Wise Man has made the motion 
with his hand which brings good with 
it, and Jesus brings us the new revelation. 
He comes from the Garden. He is the 
light thrown on to the world by the third 
of the Wise Men.” 

A smile suddenly lit up Narda’s tor¬ 
tured face. 

“I must say I am not at all modern,” 
he said to himself. “Revelation, the first 
fall, perpetual redemption! There is 
nothing in me at all antagonistic to these 
three ideas which science has repudiated. 
The instinct of my mind dwells on them. 
It is absolutely scandalous, and if the men 
of science were to hear me they would die 
of shame. Unfortunately, while I have 
the deepest respect for science, I have no 


132 THE RE-APPEARING 


respect whatever for scientists. Modern 
scientists who believe in the objective real¬ 
ity of the universe and all their formulae, 
would govern the city by means of these 
formulae, which cannot last. It is not for 
us to discover truth, and Jesus told us the 
other day that truth could not be taught. 
How can we obtain by successive and mul¬ 
tiplied effort what is eternal and one? 
All human accomplishment is marked 
with this sign of unity and eternity. 
Herodotus has said, ‘Man has found out 
what was beautiful long since, and it is 
there that we should look for instruc¬ 
tion.’ Poetry and art bring us back im¬ 
periously to the revelation of a law of 
universal harmony, and it is their func¬ 
tion to create humanity again, and to 
create it ceaselessly according to this law. 
The sculptor models the statue to which 
the poet gives speech. The men of sci¬ 
ence should do nothing more than defend 
the marble of the statue against the action 
of air and time. True science and true 


THE RE-APPEARING 133 


art are not distinct. Art and science have 
one common object in this harmony which 
is in man, and which it is their duty to 
discover in Nature. The poet and the 
man of science live in an abstract world, 
which is the foundation and the depth, 
the justification and the explanation, the 
material and the plan of the world of 
plastic reality. Both poet and man live, 
really speaking, in the supernatural. The 
man of science is always ready to proclaim 
the excellence of a law unknown till now 
or which has been forgotten, and the poet 
lends his ear unceasingly to the dictation 
of ineffable analogy. The four angles of 
the square in which I see the truth shin¬ 
ing are:—Revelation, the Fall, Redemp¬ 
tion, the Supernatural. I am an abomi¬ 
nable reactionary.” 

He shook his head. 

^^Theoretically I am a reactionary; but 
what am I in practice? Could I ever 
make my life and my thoughts one and 
the same? It is quite clear that if I go 


134 THE RE-APPEARING 


on living as I have lived until now, I 
forbid myself all real joy and all real 
self-respect. I have no difficulty in rec¬ 
onciling my loyalty with faith. My loy¬ 
alty is not the difficulty. The difficulty 


Narda hesitated. His lips trembled 
for a moment. Then he said aloud: 

“The difficulty is my cowardice. It is 
impossible for us to accept loyally the 
life we have made for ourselves, to go 
on living as nearly all of us live, . . . 

and yet we shall all go on living as we 
have lived. 

“We are the dupes of our own egoism 
and our vanity.’ We have dishonoured 
Nature, poisoned the fountains of our 
joys. We refuse to recognise the real 
man in us and in our kind. We live with¬ 
out any motive for life. We neither love 
nor live. We are violent and we are 
flabby. We are nervous, we are empty, 
we are sad. Gold is the universal goal, and 



THE RE-APPEARING 135 


it divides men into two flocks, that of the 
poor, who are bitter and inquisitive, and 
that of the rich, who have been deceived 
and are distrustful. We are dupes and 
liars, victims and torturers, cowards and 
boasters. We are no better than the 
brutes. We look at woman as a horse- 
dealer looks at horses which he means to 
buy, and woman takes this insult as a 
homage! And yet, does woman deserve 
any better? Woman as we have made 
her, as she has consented to become, is 
necessary, and our horsedealer’s look tells 
us what we think of her. What hope is 
there for the generations who will be born 
from this ignominious outrage? The 
simple answer to this question is in the 
immense number of young criminals. 
They have begun to make Society uneasy, 
and Society is trying to restrain preco¬ 
cious criminality. But there is only one 
real way. Love must be born again, and 
must be rehabilitated. As long as the 


136 THE RE APPEARING 


masters of the moment centre their activ¬ 
ity on the acquisition of money and the 
power of enjoyment, they have no right 
to prevent others from having the same 
ideals, and these others are poor and are 
young. We have no right to punish them 
for living as we live. It is true that dur¬ 
ing the last few days, since He has been 
here, everything has changed. Men show 
women a respect which astonishes them, 
and which astonishes the men who show 
it. It will not last. There can be no 
mistake about that. It is a surprise, a 
misunderstanding, and even now we can¬ 
not fail to see signs of fatigue. Jesus has 
awakened in us the tenderness which is 
always in the depths of our hearts. But 
He has had no influence upon our minds. 
The poets and artists who have been the 
first to hear His call to heroism have be¬ 
come lazy. It is true that they have given 
up the lower forms of sensuality, but what 
does that matter if they put nothing in 
its place. They have obeyed negatively, 


THE RE APPEARING 137 


their obedience has left them disconcerted 
and sterile, and the public is bored. 

“Boredom! That is what Jesus has 
brought to us! The newspapers, books, 
theatres and exhibitions, the streets— 
everything has become a bore since He 
came. Why?” 

Narda walked with bent head up and 
down his room. He stopped in front of 
a large looking-glass, into the frame of 
which were tucked pictures of naked 
women. He looked at them, then looked 
at his own face in the glass. He exam¬ 
ined it closely, analysing his features, 
which years of wakeful nights, of pleas¬ 
ures, and of suffering had already marked 
deeply. He studied the wrinkles in which 
were written the history of his miserable 
life, the complicated latticework of lines 
which crossed and recrossed one another, 
breaking off here and there and contra¬ 
dicting one another, clear signs of the con¬ 
tradictions of a mind which did not 
follow the same line always. Proofs of 


138 THE RE-APPEARING 


weakness, proofs of a will which his own 
face made clear. ^‘Why?” he asked 
again. 

“Why, because we cannot obey Him. 
He has come in vain. We cannot bear 
His coming; perhaps we cannot under¬ 
stand it. We have not the strength to 
wish. And we have not the wish to have 
strength to obey Him.” 


V 

THE SERMON ON MONTMARTE 


F uture historians, if they wish to 
arrive at the inner meaning of the 
events which I have related here 
so hastily, will not fail to study the atti¬ 
tude of the Church towards Jesus. The 
whole Church, collectively and individ¬ 
ually, ignored Him who called Himself 
the Son of God. 

Neither the Pope (who was the Pope 
nicknamed, in the prophecy attributed to 
Malachi, Religio Depopulata) nor the 
least or greatest among the princes of his 
priesthood, not even one of those priests 
who have been unfrocked or threatened, 
and who are to be found all over Paris, 
no priest, no ecclesiastic of any kind 
seemed to have taken the least notice of 
His coming. Nothing was said either in 
the Confessional or in the pulpits by men 
139 


140 THE RE APPEARING 


of the Church about His person, His doc¬ 
trine, or His acts. The priests even re¬ 
fused to reply to certain questions which 
were put to them directly, giving it to be 
understood that they were not allowed 
to answer. Was this silence a sign of dis¬ 
approval? Did it mean that they consid¬ 
ered the Visit an imposture? Or did it 
mean a deep respect for the Divine will 
and a firm resolve not to trouble the de¬ 
signs of that will? One might, greatly 
daring, deduce from the discretion of 
Jesus Himself that a tacit compact of 
mutual neutrality had been concluded 
between Him and His Church. He did 
not wish to compromise it. It was not 
to restrain Him. During the whole time 
of His new life on earth He was not once 
seen inside a temple. It was even noticed 
that on the day on which He led the 
crowd from La Place de rEtoile to Mont¬ 
martre, as I shall narrate presently. He 
went by a roundabout way across Paris 
so as to avoid passing a church. 


THE RE-APPEARING 141 


Another observation, the importance of 
which will escape nobody, is that in no 
single one of His conversations or in His 
great sermon on the hilltop, did He risk 
the least allusion, distant or otherwise, to 
the sacrament or to church ceremonies. 
The only thing He recommended was 
prayer. But led me add that the silence 
of Jesus on this point has not necessarily 
the meaning that one might be tempted to 
give it. It is not necessarily a condemna¬ 
tion of liturgic prescriptions. It must not 
be forgotten that in these things His name 
alone is the whole programme, and that if 
He did not repeat His former sayings and 
His former acts neither did He retract 
them. Let us avoid all arbitrary inter¬ 
pretation. Prayer, which He ordered, is 
the principal and to some extent the com¬ 
mon element of every sacrament. 

Besides, and I must insist upon this, for 
it is an essential consideration, the inex¬ 
plicable circumstances which, as I have 
said before, I can only chronicle in sum- 


142 THE RE-APPEARING 


mary fashion here, have occurred too re¬ 
cently for a definite appreciation of their 
significance, and their consequences, to be 
wise. Writers with more authority than 
I, will, I hope and trust, make a point of 
bringing their light to bear upon what has 
happened. This is all the more necessary 
because some writers have already dared 
to contest the objective reality of these his¬ 
toric happenings. That was to be ex¬ 
pected, but however clever and however 
wise some of these gentlemen may be, 
their criticism must yield under the 
weight of the evidence. For the occur¬ 
rences of the Divine Adventure have left 
traces in the Press and their authenticity 
is clear. It is perfectly patent that, in 
December, a Stranger calling Himself 
the Son of God appeared among us, and 
that His presence did not only excite uni¬ 
versal curiosity, but created a wide-spread 
movement of thought. The influence He 
had upon our customs is undeniable, for 
as we know too well, we still suffer from 


THE RE-APPEARING 143 


it. There is no question that we are fac¬ 
ing a difficult problem, a problem which 
is singular, which is disquieting, and 
which is of a very special nature. But 
the interest that lies in its study is incon¬ 
testable, and it would be spiritual cow¬ 
ardice to attempt to avoid it. Whatever 
be the nature and the principle of the 
unknown quantities in the equation, we 
should do our utmost to discover them by 
a series of operations of a more conclu¬ 
sive and less brutal nature than those em¬ 
ployed by the French Government, as I 
shall relate, to set the question at rest. I 
wish to lay down no law to the thinkers 
who will attempt to elucidate these mys¬ 
teries. My object is merely to recount 
what Jesus did and said, to tell what peo¬ 
ple heard Him say and saw Him do. The 
only commentary I shall add is in the 
expression of the feelings which His acts 
and sayings aroused among those who 
were the witnesses of His coming. 

With regard to the relationship of 


144 THE RE-APPEARING 


Jesus and the Church during this visit, 
let me point out this, in addition to what 
I have said already. Jesus came to Paris, 
not to Rome. He brought His second 
message to the world to the centre of mod¬ 
ern civilisation,yfhich centre is democratic 
and officially atheistic. He did not bring 
it to the centre of Christianity. Is it too 
much to deduce from this choice that He 
wished—without interrupting the action 
of His Church, but without showing His 
alliance with her—to make men open 
their eyes to His light, to the only simple 
and pure logic? We must leave this 
question open. The reader must decide 
it for himself. We can insist on it no 
more. 

In opposition to the clergy, who re¬ 
mained sternly on one side, the lay public, 
especially the intellectual aristocracy of 
the universities, had responded in great 
numbers to the call of Jesus. UHotel 
des Trois Rois was besieged from morn¬ 
ing till night by compact groups of serious 


THE RE-APPEARING 145 


men in black, whose severe elegance was 
the outward sign of their learned profes¬ 
sion. The crowd was no longer the pic¬ 
turesquely mixed crowd of the first few 
days. All these gentlemen, from the 
eldest to the youngest of them, carried on 
their persons the perfume of the dust of 
the libraries. They came prepared with 
difficult questions, which they had dis¬ 
cussed at the Sorbonne before they came. 
And it was easy to see, at first glance at 
these clever faces, that with these re¬ 
doubtable adversaries the Saviour would 
have to find some better answer than a 
parable. The memories of these men 
were stocked with facts. Their minds 
had been nourished on German literature. 
They would not be content with poetic 
symbols. They knew biology, geology, 
and history. They established them¬ 
selves upon firm ground, from which 
evangelic paradox would have no power 
to drive them. 

I will not weary the reader with a full 


146 THE RE-APPEARING 


analysis of the speeches which they made 
to Jesus. To do so I should have to fill 
a library, for they spoke of everything and 
of nothing. The journalists, who were ill- 
prepared to follow these abstruse discus¬ 
sions in detail, reported them in the news¬ 
papers with considerable negligence. 
Even Larrive, although he called himself 
a man of science, wrote long and confused 
articles about them, which the public 
found some difficulty in understanding. 
These articles, written in a mixture of 
scientific jargon and of boulevard slang, 
were thought very highly of, although 
they were not read at all, which fact 
proves the secret alliance of the two con¬ 
tradictory apophthegms, ‘‘Omne ignotum 
pro magnifico,” and “Ignoti nulla cu- 
pido.” In these articles Larrive talked 
of Lucretius, of Newton, of Lavoisier, 
and of Laplace, of Goethe, of Spencer, of 
Rau, of Claude Bernard, of Berigard, 
of Ostwald, of Lamarck, of Darwin, of 
Carnot, of Naegelli, of Democritus, 


THE RE-APPEARING 147 


of Kant, of Empedocles, of Liebnitz, of 
Descartes, of Heraclitus, Aristotle, Spi¬ 
noza, James Sully, Von Hartmann, 
Shakespeare, Seneca, Haller, Tolstoy, 
Renan Bhudda, Solomon, Nietzsche, and 
Schopenhauer, of Galileo, Taine, Copcr- 
nic, and many others without much more 
method than I have put into the list of 
names. 

Messieurs Poincare, Le Dantec, Pain- 
Icve, Metchnikoff, and all their eminent 
colleagues made surprising speeches in 
Larrive’s article on the conflict of reason 
and dogma, on the law of substance, on 
the law of evolution, on feeling and con¬ 
science, on the end of matter, on the 
origin of man, on the origin of language, 
on the freedom of thought, and so forth. 

From the replies of Jesus, which were 
summary and not too clear—perhaps they 
were not too clearly reported—it resulted 
that the Son of Man seemed to know little 
of the astonishing progress of the human 
race in the course of the last century, that 


148 THE RE-APPEARING 


He was not at all up-to-date in theoretical 
science, in the true knowledge of Nature, 
and in the marvels and countless practical 
and technical applications of scientific 
principles, to industry, commerce, hy¬ 
giene, therapeutics, and surgery. In a 
word, that He seemed to know little of 
the least and of the most important neces¬ 
sities of modern daily life. It appeared 
that Jesus had made little progress since 
the days of Judea. His ideas on hygiene 
were scandalously and dangerously primi¬ 
tive. “Not that which goeth in at the 
mouth defileth a man: but what cometh 
out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” 
Or again, “Therefore, I say unto you, 
take no thought for your life, what ye 
shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor for 
your body what ye shall put on. Is not 
your life more than meat and your body 
more than raiment?” On hearing these 
words Monsieur Metchnikoff felt posi¬ 
tively ill. He undertook to instruct 
Jesus, but Jesus interrupted him and said, 


THE RE APPEARING 149 


“Ye are blind, leaders of the blind, and 
if the blind lead the blind, shall not both 
fall into the ditch?” “The ditch shall be 
disinfected, dear Lord,” was the witty 
retort of the director of the Pasteur Insti¬ 
tute. And without being discouraged in 
the least, he made a long and complete 
speech on scientific history to Jesus, tell¬ 
ing him of all the progress and of the ben¬ 
efits of science. He wound up in these 
words. “Science has already justified the 
hopes which man put in it. It has per¬ 
mitted us to combat the most terrible dis¬ 
eases, and has rendered existence possible. 
Religion, on the contrary, which called 
for faith without criticism as a means of 
curing the ills which afflict humanity, has 
proved incapable of keeping its promise.” 

Jesus replied: 

“My Kingdom is not of this world. I 
did not promise, of old time, to cure 
humanity of its disease. My object is not 
to make life easier, but to make it holier. 
I have said ^Blessed are they that mourn.’ 


150 THE RE-APPEARING 


The important thing is not to escape pain 
but to escape evil. The struggle against 
pain is the outcome of egoism, and I have 
said, ‘He that taketh not up his cross, and 
followeth Me, is not worthy of Me.’ The 
all-important thing is to love God more 
than one’s self and to honour one’s father 
and mother, but there is no room in your 
thoughts for things of the spirit, for you 
are preoccupied with things of the flesh. 
That is why there is nothing in common 
between you and My people.” 

It is probable that these discussions be¬ 
tween the learned men and the Son of 
God were noted down word for word by 
the journalists, but the long reports of 
these discussions were a mass of contra¬ 
dictions. It must, of course, be admitted 
that the work of the reporters was made 
terribly difficult by the fact that the men 
of science disagreed among themselves. 
The discussions with Jesus degenerated, 
every day, into quarrels, in the course of 
which these men of science excommuni- 


THE RE-APPEARING 151 


Gated and anathematised one another, 
while Jesus listened with a sad smile. 

But all these academicians, all these 
noble professors could not continue to lose 
their time which after all is the world’s 
capital. Monsieur Poincare had the 
idea, and everybody thought it a happy 
one, of inviting Jesus to a public meet¬ 
ing of the Academy of Science. There 
everything could be discussed once and 
for all. 

Jesus declined the honour. 

“I was twelve years old,” He said, 
“when I consented to argue with the 
doctors in the temple. You can see for 
yourselves that I have passed that age 
now. But to-morrow I will go up on 
Montmartre and I will speak to the peo¬ 
ple. There I will say to all and every¬ 
body what it is necessary for one and all 
to know. Come with the people.” 


VI 

THE CRISIS ON THE BOURSE 

A ll Paris was advised by the 
newspapers of what was to hap¬ 
pen. 

At twelve o’clock the whole of Paris 
marched up to La Place de rEtoile. 

The weather was fine in spite of the 
season. This Thursday, the 22 nd of 
December, this day of a dark month, was 
made brilliant by an unexpected and im¬ 
possible radiance of April sunshine. 

Jesus started from the Arc de Tri- 
omphe. The children of the schools, who 
had a holiday that day, walked after him. 
The crowd followed, and behind the 
crowd followed the professors and the 
members of the Academy and of the Sor- 
bonne, whose attitude gave to the cere¬ 
monial the solemn character of a funeral 
procession. 


152 


THE RE APPEARING 153 


Jesus walked along the outside boule¬ 
vards, where the workingmen were holi¬ 
day-making in the booths of the great fair. 
He made a sign. The brass bands be¬ 
came silent, the merry-go-rounds stopped, 
and all the unhappy merrymakers, whom 
circumstances compelled to make holiday, 
joined in the procession. It passed on in 
miraculous silence, a silence in which the 
whole people felt their lives beating in 
their hearts. A silence of hope. 

On the little square on the top of the 
hill, on which is placed the statue of 
Gerard de Nerval, Jesus paused. Then 
turning to those who followed Him, He 
brought them to a standstill at some dis¬ 
tance from Him with a gesture of super¬ 
human authority. 

He was obeyed immediately and left 
alone for a short space. Leaning His 
elbow on the pedestal of the statue. He 
sank His head, and thought. 

When He stood up again, the light in 


154 THE RE-APPEARING 


His eyes was not the serene light which 
had shone there, but a flame, and the peo¬ 
ple saw that He was weeping. The 
water of His tears, added to the natural 
brilliance of His eyes, made a prismatic 
glitter which was more than human sight 
could bear. 

Slowly the tears rolled down that splen¬ 
did face of which no feature moved, and 
through His tears He looked out on the 
crowd. 

A groan of love rose from the throng 
which clustered on the little square on the 
hill, spread down the streets to the bottom 
of the hillside, further and further yet. 
The whole town which had accompanied 
Jesus from La Place de VEtoile lifted up 
their voices to Him, lifted up their mil¬ 
lion arms towards Him, towards His 
tears. 

But the hands dropped again. The 
voices were silent. The whole town lis¬ 
tened, for Jesus had opened His lips, and 
without knowing how or why, the whole 


THE RE-APPEARING 155 


town which had seen His tears, now lis¬ 
tened to and heard His words. 

Jesus said: 

^^Misereor super turbam. Woe unto 
you, sheep without a shepherd, for you 
will cast off Him who has come to you, 
and His words shall be in vain to you. 
Woe unto this disillusioned century which 
has cast off joy and truth, a century of 
barbarity which persecutes in sheer 
hypocrisy the very prophets whose virtues 
it celebrates. Woe unto you, scattered 
flock, who come together for a moment 
in the desire for unity, for you will pres¬ 
ently break off from all religion and will 
condemn yourselves.” 

Those who listened sprang back in 
revolt against this pitiless verdict, and the 
mouths of all present trembled in an out¬ 
cry of powerless rage. 

Jesus continued. His tears were dry. 
The flame in His eyes had dried them. 
His voice rang out harshly, and the sky, 
which had, all of a sudden, become a 


156 THE RE-APPEARING 


winter sky again, seemed to be bending 
down to listen to Hirn. 

^‘He that hath ears to hear, let him 
hear. The truth shall be told again. 
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs 
is the kingdom of Heaven. 

“Blessed are the so-called poor, for 
there is no other wealth than poverty. 
Blessed are ye who take nothing with 
your hands, who shut up nothing within 
the walls of your houses. Man withers 
what he touches, and possession deprives 
the possessor of the very blessing he de¬ 
sired. He folds it tight in his arms until 
he cannot see it, for satisfaction is the 
killing of desire. But you who have 
nothing, everything is yours. Your eyes 
and your spirit garner the flower of life. 
Take back to God the vivid and immortal 
love of life which makes you live. In 
God alone it shall receive full satisfaction. 
Whatever happens is but an allusion to 
God. Do not confound the symbol with 
reality. 


THE RE-APPEARING 157 

“O ye poor, ye are blessed, for ye do not 
confound the shadow with the light, or 
the letter with the spirit. But the shadow 
calls you to the light, and you know that 
all things are the letters of the name of 
God.” 

Jesus was silent, watching on the faces 
round Him the effect of His words. The 
effect varied according to the soul of those 
who listened, for everyone understood the 
Word according to himself. To some of 
them it sounded like a blessing; to others 
like a curse. All the children and nearly 
all the women understood the words quite 
simply, just as Jesus spoke them, but the 
words underwent a change in the hearing 
of nearly all the men, and this is what 
they heard. 

“Woe to ye seekers after gold, for the 
Kingdom of Heaven is not for you. Woe 
to ye who believe yourselves to be rich, 
for there is no other misery than your 
wealth. O ye who would take things 
with your hands, who would shut up the 


158 THE RE-APPEARING 


treasures of the world within the walls of 
your houses, you perish without ceasing, 
for you kill desire within yourselves in 
shamelessness, and desire is the soul of 
the spirit. You feed upon vain images, 
and you are your own sepulchres.” The 
bitterness of infinite deception marked the 
features of nearly all the men; nearly all 
the women and children smiled as though 
they were already in enjoyment of the 
promised happiness. 

Jesus went on. 

^‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall 
inherit the earth. Ye are blessed all of 
you who come to Me in meekness and 
humbleness of heart, who smile to Me as 
I smile to you, being as I am without bit¬ 
terness and without violence. To you I 
give the earth that you may enjoy it 
meekly for its joy and for your own hap¬ 
piness. You, the poor and meek, you 
will not rob it, you will not deform it, 
and when the day comes you will give 
it back to Me as I have given it to you.” 


THE RE-APPEARING 159 


The men heard these words: 

“Woe to ye violent, for nothing shall 
belong to you, neither souls nor body nor 
land, and what ye take shall be taken from 
you. 

“Woe to all you who are already think¬ 
ing of repudiating Me, who gaze on Me 
with angry eyes because in your thoughts 
you demand of Me, not only the whole 
earth, but also Heaven, now and imme¬ 
diately. Woe to you because you know 
that you are not deserving, and intend in 
spite of this knowledge to take these gifts 
by force.” 

The children smiled. 

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they 
shall be comforted. Ye are blessed who 
accept present sorrow, and who bless it as 
a promise of eternal joy. You have 
measured all the joys of the world. You 
know that they would not fill your hearts, 
and you are preparing for the one eternal 
joy. The tortures of the spirit are caused 
by the sharp corners of its limitations. 


160 THE RE-APPEARING 


Anguish of heart, anguish of flesh, are 
caused by the sins of the flesh and of the 
heart. Birth is death’s threshold, the 
years grave the wound of the spirit 
deeper, but nothing shall astonish^ you, 
and you are preparing joyfully for your 
deliverance.” 

The men heard these words: 

‘‘Woe to ye refined and the pleasure- 
seekers, who live in luxury and pleasure 
because you have chosen your lives so and 
will have no others. Woe to you who 
misunderstand the principle of life. Do 
you not know that your fathers wept? 
Why deny the inheritance of their tears? 
And you cannot even enjoy the benefits 
which your hearts covet. Sad hearts are 
filled with tenderness, and the poor have 
time to admire the visions of the world. 
But egoists and pleasure-seekers dare not 
love, for fear that life or death shall come 
and separate them from the things they 
love. They only see the emptiness which 
misfortune digs in tender hearts, for they 


THE RE-APPEARING 161 


would fill up the void with rivers of tears, 
and the vision of the world which the 
poor enjoy is, for the so-called rich and 
so-called careful men, as though it did not 
exist. For they have no leisure, and they 
are blind to all but the necessity of the 
moment. They waste all their days de¬ 
fending themselves against ruin and 
against sickness, against thieves and 
against years, against death itself. Ego¬ 
ists! You are deceived, for you will die, 
and you will go down into death by the 
staircase of despair. You will fall into 
death as into an abyss, and into this abyss 
your minds will precede you. 

The children comprehended. 

“Blessed are they who hunger and 
thirst after justice; for they shall have 
their fill. Blessed are ye when men per¬ 
secute you for justice’s sake, for yours is 
the kingdom of Heaven. 

“Blessed are ye when men shall revile 
you, and persecute you, and speak all that 
is evil against you, untruly, for My sake.” 


162 THE RE-APPEARING 


In these words the men heard: 

“Woe to ye who do not govern your 
lives in accordance with justice, for I shall 
deny you at the last day. Woe to ye who, 
busily discussing what is just and what is 
unjust, discussing law, discussing equity, 
claim to possess the truth when your 
minds are lighted only by science. In 
you I recognise the falsely rich, the vio¬ 
lent, the cowardly, all those who misun¬ 
derstand the real benefits of life, who 
refuse to put their necks under My yoke, 
who repudiate the pure tradition of their 
fathers and the only Law. You are born 
yesterday, and you think that the world 
began with you. So as to obtain a tri¬ 
umph for the things of which to-day you 
are certain, and in which you will not 
believe to-morrow, you do not hesitate to 
overthrow the State, to foment wars 
among the people. Your insolent domi¬ 
nation is witness that evil has reached its 
apogee. Your insolent domination will 
revive in all young hearts a passion for 


THE RE-APPEARING 163 


patience and for respect if these young 
hearts listen to Me. But those who, in 
their insolence have been the masters, will 
be thrown out into outer darkness.” 

The children comprehended. 

“Blessed are the merciful for they shall 
obtain mercy. 

“Blessed are ye, all ye who know how 
to pardon, who allow your brother to 
learn the beginning of life through his 
mistakes, and who for this reason forgive 
him his debt seven times and seventy 
times seven. I will forgive you your 
debt seven hundred times seventy, and 
even more often, for they have a right to 
pity who practise pity. When they re¬ 
spect their brother it is Me whom they 
respect. Me, who am burdened with the 
sins of all the world. It is Me whom 
they respect in the person of their 
brothers when they do not forget the 
divine dignity which I have given to 
humanity. And they love God more than 
themselves, yet is it themselves whom they 


164 THE RE-APPEARING 


love, and in pitying their brothers it is 
their own weaknesses to which they show 
compassion.” 

In these words the men heard: 

“Woe to ye who are pitiless, for I shall 
be without pity unto you. 

“Woe to ye who judge and who con¬ 
demn your brothers as though you had no 
share of responsibility in the crime for 
which you make them responsible. Do 
you not owe half the fine to which you 
sentence the thief, the adulterer, and the 
bearer of false witness? You, whose lives 
are a perpetual teaching of all evil? 
Whatever be your rank, whether you be 
judges, merchants or soldiers, you are all 
Pharisees, and all of you pass judgment. 
It is you who will be sentenced at the last 
hour, and there shall be no appeal for 
you, for it will not have been by your 
means that the man whom you have con¬ 
demned has been spared from the penalty 
which you inflicted on him. So shall you 
learn too late that every time that you pass 


THE RE APPEARING 165 


sentence you were your own judge and 
your own victim, and it will no longer 
be time then to cry aloud for pity from 
your brothers or from Me.” 

The children comprehended. 

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they 
shall see God. 

“Blessed are ye who have no share in 
the pollutions of the age, who wait for 
Me at the baptismal font. It is you at 
whom men laugh, and at whom they point 
the finger of disdain with an envy which 
their disdain tries to cover. It is you 
who are the real human beings. It is 
you who realise the first Divine Concep¬ 
tion. It is you who have conquered life, 
for you possess your soul within your¬ 
selves, and it is you who, if the servants 
of the Evil One did not cumber the earth, 
would disarm the jealousy of the angels. 
They would come down from Paradise 
to conclude with you the alliance which 
was intended from the beginning. And 
the Thrones and the Virtues, which are 


166 THE RE-APPEARING 


God’s own, would descend upon human¬ 
ity to help life along the last journey but 
one to endless happiness.” 

What the men heard was: 

“Woe to ye who pander to evil desire. 
Woe to you all, to all of you, for there is 
not one of you who does not betray his 
man’s mission every day by allowing his 
memory and his imagination to sink down 
by roads of mud into the night. The 
slime in which filthy beasts wallow is a 
sun and a blue sky compared with the 
ways which are the only ways in which 
ye wander. Yet it is you, even you, who 
praise without ceasing the century in 
which you live, and who are proud of 
the great things which science and in¬ 
dustry have accomplished during your 
lifetime. And you go on your road cry¬ 
ing, ‘Victory!’ declaring that your fathers 
lived barbarically, and that true civilisa¬ 
tion is the result of your labour. When 
by the brutal light of your own lamps I 
gaze at you, I do not recognise My own 


THE RE-APPEARING 167 


creation. In this elementary and frivo¬ 
lous stream of flame you have drowned 
the light of your eyes and the light of the 
stars. I recognise no longer either the 
music of the human voice, or the logic 
of your idioms, or the harmony of your 
voices, in the words which you exchange 
at long distances by means of machines 
whose nature you already share. Your 
mark upon the world is mere ugliness, 
significant of the real savagery which is 
in you. Significant of your vanity, of 
your weakness, of your violence, of your 
avarice, and of the low thoughts and pas¬ 
sions with which you pander to your in¬ 
telligence and to your heart. You purify 
with care the outside of the platter and the 
cup, but within you are full of iniquity 
and impurities. You promise yourselves 
intellectual development, but by the ways 
of your science, of your vices, you are 
going back to the monkey, whom you 
accept as an ancestor rather than admit 
that I have given you your life.” 


168 THE RE-APPEARING 


The children comprehended. 

“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they 
shall be called the children of God.” 

“Blessed are ye who can honestly say 
that you have never hated anybody, that 
you love all men, even your enemies. 
You raise your hand only to show those 
who are in doubt the goal for which they 
seek, and to put them into the right path. 
You speak only to ask your brothers what 
their needs may be, to give them the ad¬ 
vice of your experience or the consolation 
of your tenderness. Even in the fury of 
war you would remain wise and peaceful, 
having no hatred, being truly, simply, 
and healthily human, perfectly human as 
your Holy Father is perfectly divine.” 

What the men heard was: 

“Woe to ye enemies of peace, for you 
shall be called the children of the devil. 
Woe to ye who live among your brothers 
as wolves among a fold. All men arc 
your enemies and you are perpetually at 
war with them. You beat your children 


THE RE APPEARING 169 

and you ill-treat them, or even, and this 
is far worse, you are mere strangers to 
them. To the weak you are torturers, to 
the strong you are rogues. You call them 
up for judgment. You rob them by 
stratagem, hiding under the cloak of the 
laws. You have no faith, and no love, 
and yet you pretend to be honourable 
men because your crimes escape the legal 
definition of a crime, and it would there¬ 
fore be a danger for anyone to reproach 
you with them. But you will be re¬ 
proached with them one day. On the 
formidable Day of Universal Witness.” 

The children comprehended; the men 
trembled with fury and despair. 

For one moment Jesus remained silent, 
smiling in answer to the smiles and gaz¬ 
ing calmly and implacably at the furious 
looks. 

Then He spoke again, and this time 
all heard what He said in the same 
words. 

have not come to abolish the law, 


170 THE RE-APPEARING 


but to accomplish it. The law is eternal, 
immutable, universal. It orders the life 
of Nature as it orders the life of the spirit, 
and it should be enough for you, O blind, 
to open your eyes and know the truth. 
For the plan of the universe is One. I 
have come to remind you of this unity, 
which should also be that of your inner 
lives, of your Life. I have come to re¬ 
mind you of the principles which your 
science denies, and which are denied by 
your progress. I have come to remind 
you of the one meaning of all things, 
which the first glance of the first man 
clearly understood when I said ^Eppheta.’ 
He saw everywhere the image of truth, 
as you would see it if your eyes were with¬ 
out guile, if things could ever appear to 
you for the first time. But you are all 
of you corrupters of the holy past, from 
which you ought to draw unceasingly as 
from the unquenchable spring of all wis¬ 
dom. You are the victims of recent Kab- 


THE RE-APPEARING 171 


its which are born of your pride and your 
ignorance. 

“You do not join your efforts to those 
of your fathers, not knowing that the true 
orientation of the future lies in the past. 
You dream of crossing boundaries which 
ages have respected until now, and which 
I set down for you. You are the adver¬ 
saries of the spirit. Beware lest I aban¬ 
don you to the illusion of victory. 

“You bring your children up in false¬ 
hood. You charge their memories with 
vain bits of knowledge which are mere 
grains of sterile sand, and, to deceive 
their hunger for justice and for love, you 
babble to them of the rights of man, of 
Socialism, of solidarity. You praise the 
great things which you say you have done 
for the happiness of the humble and of 
the poor, for the pensions which you have 
assured to the old and sick, for the cease¬ 
less war which you wage against misery 
and sickness. Believing yourselves to be 


172 THE RE-APPEARING 


better and wiser than the old priests and 
the prophets, you teach interested virtue, 
declaring that if your children wish to 
live long in the land they must not honour 
their father and mother but themselves. 
It is man himself whom man ought to 
respect, for intemperance and inconti¬ 
nence produce all disasters. But you are 
beginning to tremble before your chil¬ 
dren, for you are already beginning to 
see on their lips while you teach them 
their lessons, a smile which makes you 
uneasy. Beware lest they soon treat 
you as you treat your fathers at whom you 
scoff. Beware lest they practise at your 
expense your own miserable wisdom. 
Beware lest I abandon you to the misfor¬ 
tune of having persuaded them. 

“O hypocrites, ye have taught them too 
much. Why should they not laugh at 
your morals, O preachers of prudence, 
for they know that the State must fall to 
pieces if you were listened to. How can 
they forget that you live and that you 


THE RE-APPEARING 173 


cause them to live, by drunkenness and 
fornication? O you who tax the vices 
which your eloquent indignation re¬ 
proves. Every virtue in the world which 
you have made, and which excludes all 
virtue, would be the worst of all possible 
misfortunes, and that you know. 

“O hypocrites, ye need not pretend to 
love life. You will not deceive the living 
very long. They are already beginning 
to understand your true thoughts. They 
have seen why you fear them, and even 
now they are thinking of this fear as your 
only wisdom. O cowards, O professors 
of cowardice, you wait for man to be old 
before you hold out a helping hand to 
him. You wait until the strong man has 
used up his energy and has succumbed 
under the weight of labour and of years. 
Then, not till then, you will help him to 
end his days in peace. O ye who have 
never lived, O ye dead, bury your dead 
and let the living live. It is when a plant 
is full of sap that it should be helped to 


174 THE RE-APPEARING 


grow, to seek the air and Heaven, to pro¬ 
duce all its flowers and all its fruits. It 
is when man is still in his youth and in 
harmony with Nature, which is eternally 
young, that man should have all light, and 
all help, and should be saved from error 
and from sin. It is then that he should 
be prevented from deceiving himself 
with mere appearances. It is then that 
he should be helped to find his place in 
the kingdom of God. 

“But ye seek first the kingdom of God. 
You received this command twenty cen¬ 
turies ago, and you know that, being 
divine, it is true also in its human mean¬ 
ing. Seek ye first accomplishment ac¬ 
cording to the premises of your own truth. 
Add your own light to the torch of the 
world. Shelter it between your hands 
lest the rain and the wind extinguish it. 
When your eyes open at the crossroads 
take the path which leads upwards. You 
will meet Me there, and you will be daz¬ 
zled with joy at the discovery of your- 


THE RE-APPEARING 175 


selves in Me. Seek ye first My kingdom. 
It is yours. You will know yourselves in 
coming to Me, by your disdain for all 
which is not the interest of the Supreme 
Being, by the cultivation of your own 
perfections. For the world is nothing, 
and I reckon the world as nothing if it 
be interposed between Me and you. 
There are but I who am your perfection, 
and you who are on the way to your per¬ 
fection. Whatever draws you from Me 
turns you from yourselves. I adjure you 
to live. I ask of you the flowers of hero¬ 
ism and of genius, whose seeds I put into 
you lovingly. Everything is an element 
of life for everyone who makes the reso¬ 
lution to live. Everything is life, effort, 
pain, even sin. Live! Live in the sweet 
intoxication of the wine of life. Live in 
the ecstasy of the ordinary miracle of 
every day. Live without ceasing. Love 
life, for life is the way to the Kingdom. 
Only those die who have not chosen to 
live. Look for the Kingdom.” 


176 THE RE-APPEARING 

The shining face of Jesus spread its 
brightness on the faces of the women and 
the children, and the men themselves, 
shivering with hope and with fear, waited 
and hesitated to be asked to take the road 
to the Kingdom, for they felt that now 
the words of Jesus did not regard them. 
And some of the women, too, felt that the 
words of Jesus did not regard them either. 
And Jesus finished, speaking for them 
and to them. 

“The generation which has reached 
maturity will not have the strength that 
it should have to take My road, for 
already the abomination of desolation has 
found its place in the temple of its heart. 
Adulterous generation which fails to rec¬ 
ognise the three virtues! Generation of 
pride! Ye think ye have found your 
proper nature by your own intelligence, 
and that is why I have stricken you with 
blindness and with sterility. Loveless 
generation! Ye think that truth can be 
the conquest of intelligence reduced to 


THE RE-APPEARING 177 


itself, of the spirit eternal. But I did not 
create man in several people. Man is 
but one. I do not allow the reason of 
man to silence his heart. While man 
thinks, his heart in which I have ordered 
him to merge the centre of his bodily and 
of his moral life, does not cease to beat. 

“Will man ever reckon up the hours 
during which his brain takes necessary 
leisure while his heart continues its beat¬ 
ing faithfully? The centuries will never 
know a worse disease than this cold, talk¬ 
ative, authoritative intellectuality. It 
leaves this miserable generation wavering 
between the empty abyss of its soul, from 
which it has exiled Me, and the empty 
abyss of a world which is slipping back 
into original darkness. O frivolous gen¬ 
eration! Pure intellectuality ends in 
nothing but pure materiality. The spirit 
left to itself contradicts and disperses 
itself, resigning itself to the slavery of 
the elementary forces. The resignation 
which I ask of you is liberation. You 


178 THE RE-APPEARING 


have preferred to that the bitterest of 
slavery. I call you to a union of hearts 
from which is born unity of spirit. You 
turn away from Me to scatter yourselves 
into space and into time. I can hope 
nothing more of you. Withered hearts 
and withered branches must be cast into 
the fire and must return to those elements 
of time and space from which they come, 
according to My will, but which they 
should have made to prosper in My love. 

“Wicked and adulterous generation! 
Ye have killed with every possible tor¬ 
ture those who come to you from Me. 
The seers you sentence to shameful pun¬ 
ishment, by sentences which you never 
formulated, but which were always 
understood. They bear witness against 
you, and I cannot refuse to hear them, 
and their witness is your destruction. O 
flatterers, sycophants, Pharisees, O men 
of science. You have no idea of revising 
the sentence which you have passed upon 
my sermons. I shall ask you to render 


THE RE-APPEARING 179 


account to me of the martyrdom of my 
servants, and you will have to pay in its 
entirety the debt you contracted to them. 

“You must disappear so that My 
thought may spring up and may fructify 
in the souls of the younger generation. 
And the last delays will be short. Their 
period has always begun. You have 
announced this yourselves. You intel¬ 
lectual men, who know all that is written 
in books of the moment, if you had not 
forgotten everything, if you knew as 
much as men knew in the early days, you 
would not need Me to teach you to-day 
that the vulgarisation of knowledge is one 
of the signs of the end. For this vulgari¬ 
sation is nothing but pulverisation. The 
universal ignorance of what it is neces¬ 
sary to know has, far from growing less, 
grown greater, by this vulgarisation. 
For all this lighting, science has set men 
out of the path which would take him to 
the real truth, to Me. And if you knew 
how to read, you would understand that 


180 THE RE-APPEARING 


your books point to the end of time, for, 
very properly, they count the years which 
sky and earth have yet to live, and cal¬ 
culate the accidents which may lessen the 
number of these years. From these spec¬ 
ulations spring counsels of folly and of 
violence. This preoccupation of the end 
to come, this conviction that the days of 
the earth have no future, discourage hope. 
But I who have promised eternity to you 
have no pardon for those who despair. 
Between Me and the young hearts in 
which I have lighted the hope of re-birth 
you must disappear, you withered intel¬ 
lectuals and sensual egoists. You who 
hash up dry truths which deceive both 
the heart and the reason. I hand ye over 
to the darkness which ye have chosen for 
yourselves, for ye have sinned against 
love and against the spirit. 

“To My children I say, ‘Watch and 
pray. Love one another.’ ” 


THE RE-APPEARING 181 


Little by little every man bent his 
head under the weight of this just and 
irrevocable sentence. The women and 
children bent their heads too with mixed 
feelings, of pity for those who had been 
sentenced, and of hope for themselves. 
The vivid words had ceased to vibrate, 
heads were raised, and a look of astonish¬ 
ment came into all eyes. Jesus was no 
longer there! The crowd became wildly 
excited. Astonishment, deception, con¬ 
sternation, drove it mad. 

At first it remained silent, for it did not 
understand. Then there was a movement 
of revolt. Reproaches, insults, and blas¬ 
phemies were heard on every side, min¬ 
gled with incoherent supplications. 

The people on the square on the hill 
top had to fight against the crowd which 
pushed up from below. This necessity 
of fighting for their own existence made 
them forget the terror which the sudden 
and mysterious disappearance of Jesus 
had engendered. 


182 THE RE-APPEARING 


Suddenly the crowd melted in a wild 
rush down to the bottom of the hill, and 
the rumour of His disappearance spread 
throughout the town like lightning. 

In a few moments it was known that 
there was no longer any hope—that Jesus 
had disappeared. People left Mont¬ 
martre as an audience leaves the theatre 
when the curtain has fallen. The men, 
frowning and miserable, forsook the 
place where they had received sentence 
as quickly as they could. The young 
mothers walked more slowly, exchanging 
as they went happy glances with the girls 
and children. 


The journalists went down into the 
town in silence and gloom, walking in 
little groups. 

Narda walked alone, getting a little 
farther from his comrades at every step. 

Larrive ran after him, and Narda 


THE RE-APPEARING 183 


shrugged his shoulders in a way which 
the other did not understand. 

“No, no,’’ said Larrive, “I’m not going 
to bore you. I only want to know one 
thing. Are you going to make a long 
story of it?” 

“I don’t think we need bother ourselves 
about it,” said Narda. “If I were you 
I would have a chat with your editor 
before you begin writing.” 

“The fact is,” said Larrive, “that if we 
had to write a full account of all we have 
just heard- Tell me, between our¬ 

selves, what do you think of it?” 

“It doesn’t interest me.” 

Larrive nodded. 

“Nor me. He’s done for Himself.” 

Narda gave him his hand and moved 
on, but Larrive held Narda’s hand fast 
in his own. 

“You don’t mean to say that you are 
not going down to the paper?” 

“My dear fellow,” said Narda, “I re- 



184 THE RE-APPEARING 


peat, the whole thing is of no further 
interest. There will be twenty lines in 
the paper to-night, and those twenty lines 
will be the same in every rag in Paris.” 

“It’s about time we began to write of 
something else. Don’t you think so?” 

“At all events, we shall not be asked 
to write any more about Him.” 

Narda shook himself free and disap¬ 
peared in the crowd. 

He longed to be alone, alone in his 
room. He wanted to sit by the fireside 
and try for one last time to realise him- 

self. !fili 

He grumbled as he walked. 

He was tired, discouraged, worried by 
the feeling that he had been cruelly de¬ 
ceived, that there was no possible com¬ 
fort. The future seemed to him a desert. 
He had been deceived by a mirage, and 
now he had fallen back into the abomi¬ 
nable reality. 

“Fortunately there is death,” he said 
aloud. But his voice showed him the 



THE RE-APPEARING 185 

meaning of his thoughts, and he shud¬ 
dered. 

“Have I actually got as far as that? 
Am I really longing for death? After 
all, it’s quite logical. Since the life 
which we have made for ourselves is 
unbearable, there are but two ways out 
of it. Wc must either die or follow 
Him; as it is impossible to follow 
Him . . 

Surprise grew on him at the certainty 
with which he affirmed this impossibility. 
He could not understand the new and 
apparently definite side of his conscience. 
“It is impossible, and it will never be 
possible. I am absolutely assured, now, 
of all I said the other day. All is misery. 
He appears to ignore the conditions, the 
elements, the modern fatality of our life. 
He goes on talking as though America 
had not been discovered. And yet He 
seems to hope. He seems to reckon on 
the coming generation. What innocence! 
Even if we admit that young people who 


186 THE RE-APPEARING 


have seen Him understand and love Him, 
we who are older are here to put that 
right, to make them understand, to turn 
them from this folly of the Cross. No, 
no. We could no more live in His 
shadow than He can live in us. Life 
calls to us away from Him, and against 
Him. He spoke just now of a re-birth, 
and it is not the first time that He has 
spoken of it, but to-day we will take Him 
at His word. We must aspire to the 
resurrection of the flesh, and we do not 
understand this as He understands it. 
We shall not wait till the Last Day to 
celebrate this re-birth. This is how we 
shall obey the injunctions of this Saviour, 
and so shall He not have come altogether 
in vain.” 

As he slipped his key into the lock of 
his door Narda felt his fingers tighten on 
the metal, and he had the impression that 
he was going to violate the solitude of his 
retreat, the pure silence of this room in 
which he had thought so many thoughts 


THE RE-APPEARING 187 


entirely strange and contrary to those 
which were now in his mind. 

Nervously he pushed the key into the 
lock, turned it and opened the door. 

“It is not my fault. I was ready to 
listen to Him. His words are contradic¬ 
tory and unintelligible. He says livcl 
and He says, ‘Blessed are they that 
mourn.’ I accepted the call to energy 
and love. I cannot accept the call to 
pain, to useless sacrifice. I consented to 
the creative effort, to the effort which 
affirms. I cannot agree to negative effort, 
to an effort which would cut off my own 
life from me. He said, ‘Those only die 
who have not chosen to live.’ But 
what He gives us as life is immediate 
death. How could those die who no 
longer exist? And this Kingdom of God 
of which He talks to us, which He orders 
us to seek, which prefaces in our beings 
heroism, holiness, perfection, it is nothing 
but a principle, which He tries to impose 
upon our will.” 


188 THE RE-APPEARING 


“No,” concluded Narda, as he lit his 
lamp. “He shall not gain me. His 
morality is no clearer than scientific truth. 
It is impossible for me without light from 
above, which I have not received, to see 
in this harsh doctrine of His the remedy 
for our great wretchedness. It is as 
though He had not come. He would do 
well to go. We knew all that He is 
preaching. We have no further use for 
it. We can no longer desire it. Human 
conception cannot admit the divine ex¬ 
pression. The time has passed when 
people died of laughter, when the salt 
water of our tears was the necessary elixir 
of life. The world is sick of the words 
^eternal compensation.’ ” 

He went to his writing table, and 
turned over a number of manuscript 
notes, newspaper cuttings, and pamphlets. 

“Let’s get back to serious work, to prac¬ 
tical necessities, to really useful things. 
I’ve allowed my mind to wander far too 
long; to-morrow I must make my liveli- 


THE RE-APPEARING 189 


hood again. ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom 
of God!’ Rubbish!” 

His hand faltered an instant among his 
papers, his gaze became distant, a shock¬ 
ing expression of sorrow harrowed his 
countenance. 

“I know,” he thought to himself, “that 
this hour marks in my life the beginning 
of my final and irremediable decadence. 
I consent to it. When I thought that I 
recognised Him it seemed to me that 
I had been calling for Him always, and I 
felt myself growing out towards Him. 
That moment was supreme. It was the 
only real minute in my life. I felt myself 
raised out of myself and above my poor 
comrades by an all-powerful breath of 
hope. But I have fallen back, I have 
fallen back lower than I was before, lower 
than all the other fellows were, for they 
have never had the flash of comprehen¬ 
sion which was vouchsafed to me. And 
now there can be no further redemption 
for me. What do I lack? Intelligence? 


190 THE RE-APPEARING 


Innocence? Courage? It doesn’t mat¬ 
ter. It’s too late now.” 

Tears swelled up in Narda’s eyes; he 
closed them. And under the closed lids 
he saw a landscape of stone and metal. 
He saw the picture of a large town in 
which, at stated distances, the lamps lit 
up the darkness. Numbers of citizens, 
each one of whom looked exactly like his 
neighbour, went, slowly and with meas¬ 
ured step, indifferent to all things, along 
the cold streets. He watched them, not¬ 
ing their heavy walk, their bent heads, 
and he saw that their only care was the 
care for every day. The day which was 
dying in the heavens, and in their soul 
was the yesterday and the to-morrow of 
other pale monotonous and empty days. 
All these passers-by walked in the same 
direction, towards the end of the town. 
As they walked, the lights grew fewer, 
and at the end it was quite dark. It 
seemed to Narda that these pilgrims of 
emptiness represented humanity, as it is. 


THE RE-APPEARING 191 


the immense neutral wave of time. These 
wise men did their day’s work every day 
straightforwardly and proudly, sadly and 
patiently, and with no appreciable mo¬ 
tive. If they now and again listened to 
the seers and the apostles, who tried to 
tell them of a motive which should en¬ 
noble their activities, who tried to show 
them beyond the dark streets where the 
town ended, a brightness greater and 
purer than that of the lamps, they very 
soon realised that there was no truth in 
the words of the seers and apostles. They 
soon turned away from them to begin or 
to continue their labour, to build great 
houses by the river side, to wait com¬ 
fortably for death, or to carry heaps of 
stones from one side of the road to the 
other, to heap gold up in the cellars, to 
judge one another and to sentence one 
another, to torture one another ingen¬ 
iously, to murder trees and animals, to 
make innumerable objects which were 
necessary to their useless life. And this 


192 THE RE-APPEARING 


vision, which was the world’s past, was 
his future. Now that Jesus had spoken 
again and had spoken in vain, that was 
undoubtedly the unenviable future. The 
days would die one after the other, iden¬ 
tically one with the other, in souls, which 
would be all alike, and would continue 
dying until the world had ceased to live. 
Men would continue to wander with 
weary hearts along the cold streets into the 
darkness. But as, under his closed eye¬ 
lids, Narda watched the long, colourless 
procession, he wondered at the sight of 
one of the passers-by, who went up the 
street in the other direction, against the 
stream. He came out of the shadow. 
He walked towards the better lighted por¬ 
tion of the street. His step had spring in 
it, and was the step of a free man. He 
could not see his features very well, but 
he could see that in the man’s face was 
a look of joy, and as he came nearer 
Narda recognised him. He recognised 
himself. Not quite the same man whom 


THE RE-APPEARING 193 


he had seen in the looking-glass yesterday 
or a few moments before. This man was 
younger, and his eyes were brighter. His 
forehead was higher. Narda recognised 
himself as he might have been if he had 
taken another road, the road undoubtedly 
which this better half of his had taken. 
He saw his face now clearly, and he saw 
that it beamed with a radiant joy. This 
second self of his had just heard Jesus 
talking on the Mount. He had heard 
Him giving utterance to the immortal 
thoughts, which since his own childhood 
he had heard vaguely, in his heart and 
brain, and which until then he had vainly 
tried to put into lucid words. Jesus had 
put them into glorious words for him, 
and the young man, drunken with this 
glory, forgetful of the greyness of the 
moment and of the place, rushed to his 
lamp to write down the truth and to 
transmit it to the future generations, in 
undying verse which future ages should 
remember. 


194 THE RE-APPEARING 


‘‘So there shall always be seers and 
apostles to listen to Him,” said Narda. 
“He has not come in vain, for this man 
heard Him. There shall always be seers 
who will hold out hands to one another 
across the emptiness of centuries, this 
man was one of them, and their hands 
will always meet, and will always be up¬ 
held in prayer to Him, so that He may 
pardon the unworthy.” 


VII 

THE REJECTION 

Uj AM perfectly certain of it,’’ re- 
I plied the Prefect of Police. ‘‘A 
few more days of this sort of 
thing and our public credit will go, to 
say nothing of our public money and”— 
here the Prefect dropped his voice—“of 
our Government.” 

“But what can be done?” 

“I have come to you for the remedy. 
Monsieur le President.” 

The President of the French Republic 
thought for a few moments. Then he 
said: 

“To find the remedy we must lay hands 
on the cause of the trouble.” 

“I have had the honour of pointing it 
out to you. The trouble comes from the 
extraordinary honesty which has come 
into Paris like a new form of disease. As 
195 


196 THE RE-APPEARING 


you know, the mania has become general. 
Everybody is suffering from it. The 
magistrates, the men of business, the 
journalists, even the speculators have not 
escaped the disease, and the consequences 
are inappreciable and terrible.” 

“I know,” the President interrupted 
with an impatient gesture. “I know. 
But what I want to know is, what I don’t 
understand is, the explanation of this 
extraordinary, this monstrous wave of 
honesty.” 

think. Monsieur le President, that 
you know as much on this point as I do.” 

The President looked fixedly at the 
Prefect. 

“Perhaps I do,” he said. “But tell me 
what is in your mind. Tell me whom 
you think responsible for this awful dis¬ 
aster.” 

''Mon Di . , . !” began the Pre¬ 

fect of Police. But he stopped before 
finishing the word. The exclamation 
was too apposite for him to finish it; the 


THE RE-APPEARING 197 

two men, silent for a moment, stared at 
one another. 

“Without doubt this wide-spread ruin 
which is threatening Paris is in some 
measure due to the presence in the city 
of the Man, who, since the nth of 
December . . 

“But there was trouble on the Bourse 
before He came.” 

“True. There was trouble on the 
Bourse two months ago, but He may have 
begun to show His influence from a dis¬ 
tance, even before He came.” 

“It’s quite plausible.” 

“I cannot,” said the Prefect, “tell you 
the exact moment when the princes of 
finance began to make it understood that 
they would undertake none but strictly 
honest transactions. When I first learned 
of it, this tornado of purity had already 
been in full blast for more than a week. 
It was already a plague.” 

“And the contagion was universal?” 

“Why, yes. Even the outside brokers 


198 THE RE-APPEARING 


(who, as you know, are the business rivals 
of the sworn brokers, the agents de 
change) acted like men each one of 
whom had sworn to himself to be irre¬ 
proachably virtuous for the future. One 
evening seven or eight weeks ago, I was 
told of an extraordinary phenomenon. 
Every one of the sixty-six agents de 
change who deal in a hundred and fifty 
thousand million francs of nominal cap¬ 
ital, and the two hundred bankers who 
make up the outside market and who deal 
in twenty thousand million francs of 
bonds and shares, each of these two hun¬ 
dred and sixty-six men sent for the people 
they employed, and spoke to them as 
follows: 

“ ^Gentlemen, a new era has begun for 
the Paris Stock Exchange. From this 
moment we consider ourselves as priests 
of the priesthood of finance. We intend 
to be strictly and exclusively honest mid¬ 
dlemen. Each one of us is nothing but a 
link in the chain by which the car of 


THE RE-APPEARING 199 


public virtue is dragged along. We arc 
together the most essential force of 
France. The credit of the people is 
measured by the property of its citizens. 
France’s wealth is in its gold, and all 
States are our debtors. This immense 
expansion of French gold compensates 
for the deplorable decrease in the French 
birth-rate. But while we may take pride 
in our financial power, we must remember 
our duty. In the future, therefore, we 
will do no transactions which are not 
strictly honourable. It will not be easy 
to carry out this desire on our part. In 
the future, gentlemen, you must be very 
careful as to what orders you accept. 
Capitalists often deceive themselves. 
You must be careful not to gain undue 
influence through your friends or through 
the Press. You must not deal in any 
stocks or shares which are not worth their 
actual price. You cannot refuse all 
orders for the settlement. These arc 
sometimes necessary, but you must refuse 


200 THE RE-APPEARING 


them if they appear to you not to be given 
with an honest purpose. We will have 
no more liquidations where hundreds of 
millions, sometimes thousands of millions, 
of stock change hands without their ade¬ 
quate value in money. Gentlemen, we 
depend upon you. In the course of the 
next fortnight or at most in the course of 
the next month, all speculative positions 
on the Paris Stock Exchange must be 
closed. We may suffer in our material 
interests, but our profession and the Paris 
Bourse will profit morally. Our con¬ 
sciences are clear. We know our duty 
and we look serenely to the future.’ ” 

^^These were the words of every one of 
our princes of finance, and the clerks and 
the brokers thoroughly agreed with 
them.” 

“What madness,” said the President. 

“On the 7th of November,” the Prefect 
went on, “the Bourse was busier than 
ever. There was a terrible uproar inside 
the building. The crowd round the 


THE RE-APPEARING 201 


stand of the agents de change and in each 
one of the markets appeared to have gone 
ulators, whether for the fall or for the 
rise, closed their positions. There was 
mad. Liquidation was general. Spec- 
no great and sudden change in prices, but 
prices weakened at the end of the day, for 
the magic mirage of distant hope had dis¬ 
appeared. The speculators had to close 
their positions, for they had been told 
that no orders would in future be taken 
from them unless they undertook to de¬ 
liver or to take up their stock on settling 
day. The activity of the Bourse grew 
gradually less until the settling day on 
November 15th. The excitement on the 
7th had been like a set-piece of fireworks, 
dazzlingly bright, but a precursor of 
darkness. Business slowed down on the 
Bourse. The brokers ceased to worry 
their clients to do business. The dealers 
on the Exchange refused all orders which 
seemed speculative. There were no more 
pieces of sensational news followed by 


202 THE RE-APPEARING 


sharp rises and falls in prices. There 
were no more tips, there were no more 
operations from which the public suf¬ 
fered. Politicians no longer used their 
position to speculate upon the Stock Ex¬ 
change. The liquidation of the 15th was 
a simple and an easy one. Very little 
stock changed hands, and comparatively 
little money. The Bourse had been puri¬ 
fied without any swift change in prices, 
but weakness was the characteristic of 
the market. There was no excitement. 
There was very little business. The days 
on the Bourse seemed interminable, for 
the foolish practical jokes of men who 
had nothing to do were the only excite¬ 
ment. The Bourse became anaemic. 
Business was dying. On the 8th, as you 
may remember, I pointed out this grave 
state of affairs to the Prime Minister. 
Business was paralysed. Industrial and 
commercial firms began to be very uneasy. 
The restaurants and cafes had been prac¬ 
tically empty for a fortnight. Nobody 


THE RE-APPEARING 203 


supped any longer. The actresses began 
to complain bitterly. Much of their 
money came from operations on the Stock 
Exchange, and jewellers and dressmakers 
did no more business either. No motor¬ 
cars were sold. Luxury began to desert 
Paris. People were becoming econom¬ 
ical, virtuous and poor. Indirectly but 
invincibly poverty grew upon the whole 
working population, the enormous popu¬ 
lation which lives on the luxuries and 
pleasures of the rich. 

“The Prime Minister agreed with me 
that the evil was caused by the abomi¬ 
nable crisis of virtue among the princes 
of finance, but we came to no practical 
conclusion.” 

“What can be done?” murmured the 
President. “He drove the money lenders 
out of the Temple.” 

“In the second half of November things 
got even worse. Nobody would do any 
business at all. The clubs, and the gam¬ 
bling hells, which the Government per- 


204 THE RE APPEARING 


mits in the big towns and in the watering 
places, became crowded. People de¬ 
serted the Stock Exchange for baccarat, 
and immense sums of money were lost. 
Then all of a sudden, as perhaps you will 
remember. Monsieur le President, a num¬ 
ber of banking firms with resounding 
names established themselves round the 
Bourse and advertised enormously. They 
did an enormous trade, for all sorts of 
people, who were greedy of gain and 
greedy of emotion, gamblers of all kinds 
rushed to the bucket shops now that the 
Bourse no longer satisfied their passion. 

“Naturally enough the public was ter¬ 
ribly robbed. The Law Courts and I 
received countless complaints from all 
sides. The absence of business on the 
Bourse had brought in its wake a general 
rush to the gambling hells, and failures 
and suicides became general. French 
industry began to rock upon its base. 
The newspapers in Europe and in Amer¬ 
ica prophesied ^the end of France.’ The 


THE RE-APPEARING 205 


Government found it impossible to col¬ 
lect taxes. The economical, commercial, 
and industrial well-springs of France be¬ 
gan to dry up. Nobody would do any 
real business. Two months of honesty 
had sunk the country into a lethargy 
which was terribly like the sleep of 
death.” 

“Horrible.” 

“You are right. Monsieur le President. 
This state of things was horrible. But 
there was worse to come.” 

“I know, I know.” 

“Yes, you remember the extraordinary 
phenomenon of the blank pages in the 
newspapers, the miracles in the town 
halls, in drawing-rooms, and in the 
streets. You have not forgotten the 
supernatural boredom which gradually 
sapped the springs of Parisian activity. 
The gambling houses died away as the 
Bourse had died away. The gamblers 
were converted as the princes of finance 
had been converted. There are no more 


206 THE RE-APPEARING 


thieves in Paris, now. It is the end of 
everything. The Treasury has no more 
money, and has been obliged to stop the 
payments which were made at first to the 
restaurant keepers and publicans so that 
the people who had no work to do should 
get amusement. We are lost. Monsieur 
le President. To-morrow rioting is 
bound to come. It is the end of every¬ 
thing. Unless-” 

The President had been sitting with hi 9 
head in his hands. 

“Unless,” he said. 

“Let’s talk it over,” said the Prefect 
simply. 

The President spoke no word, but 
looked at the Prefect of Police, and there 
was a question in his eyes. 

“With your consent I will go at once 
and ask Him to . . .” 

The two men caught one another’s eye, 
and both men nodded. 

“But will He consent?” asked the Pres¬ 
ident, after a moment’s silence. 


THE RE-APPEARING 207 


“I think so. Resistance is not usual 
with Him.” 

‘‘But the people? Is there nothing to 
be feared from them?” 

“Certainly not. We must not forget 
the fund of commonsense in the people of 
Paris. They dislike anything extraordi¬ 
nary, and they have had enough of this.” 

“Then, my dear Prefect, don’t lose a 
minute. Be as quick as you can.” 

The Prefect was bowing to take his 
leave. 

“One second,” said the President of the 
Republic, keeping him back by a button 
of his coat. “Is to-day not the 24th of 
December?” 

“Exactly.” 

“Then it is on Christmas Day that you 
are going to . . .?” 


VIII 


I T was evening, the evening of Decem¬ 
ber 25th. There had been no sun¬ 
shine all day. The sky, which was 
heavy, looked a dirty copper colour and 
showed that a snow-storm was hanging 
over the town. 

In spite of the darkness there was not 
a light in the windows. Even the street 
lamps, with incredible negligence, had 
not been lit. 

At four o’clock there was hardly a soul 
to be seen, even in the busiest streets. 
The black silence of the sky had gained 
the houses. The town appeared to be 
hiding what it was doing or what it was 
allowing to be done, as though it had 
understood that darkness was necessary 
for the deed. For in spite of the precau¬ 
tions which had been taken to keep it 
208 


THE RE-APPEARING 209 


secret, the expulsion order had become 
known to the whole of Paris as soon as 
it had been decided on. 

This kind of universal and simultane¬ 
ous divination may be reckoned as one of 
the most extraordinary phenomena of 
this memorable time, and what was 
stranger still was that, though everybody 
knew about it, nobody spoke of it. 

The newspapers, which had only given 
three lines to the Sermon on the Mount, 
said nothing of it at all. The papers 
spoke once more of the ordinary things 
of ordinary life, of politics, of science, of 
feminism, of railway accidents, of the 
state of the streets of Paris, of the dresses 
of well-known actresses, of crimes, of 
murders, and of the coming boom in 
business. 

The conspiracy of silence had organ¬ 
ised itself spontaneously. It seemed to 
have been organised with the complicity 
of the Heavens and of the darkness. 


210 THE RE-APPEARING 


The automobile of the Prefect of 
Police ran swiftly and unimpeded 
through the deserted streets to I'Hotel 
des Trois Rots, 

The Prefect was received at once. 

When he entered the little room where 
Jesus was waiting for him, he had the 
comfortable feeling that there would be 
no difficulty and no delay. Everything 
had, to all intents and purposes, been 
done already. It was now merely a mat¬ 
ter of formality. 

“Monsieur,” said the magistrate with 
urbanity, “I have a delicate mission to 
perform.” 

Jesus had His cloak upon His shoul¬ 
ders, and His hat was in His hand. 

“I am waiting,” He said. 

“In the name of the French Republic,” 
said the Prefect, in a voice which trem¬ 
bled a little, “I have the honour and the 
regret to request you to leave Paris and 
France as quickly as possible.” 

Jesus smiled. 


THE RE-APPEARING 211 


“I am used to these happenings,” He 
said. “The Gadarenes made a similar 
request to me. I had, as you may re¬ 
member, cast out a few poor Devils into 
a herd of swine, and these ran violently 
down a steep place into the sea. The 
inhabitants of that country besought Me 
that I would depart out of their coasts.” 

The Prefect bit his lips. 

“May I feel assured,” he said, “of Your 
respect for our laws?” 

“Depart,” said Jesus. 


THE END 



\ 






* 






\ 




4 


r 


I 


I 


t 
























> ■ ■* 




« * 




/> 


jpy.'*'. .I* »• f' ' 




'Ji 




« ». 


' f 




• t 


HP'>' 




ft 


ti 


\ 


»• 


't;' 




J > 






' ‘ 1. • oi 




hi*/ 


>1^ 


- 


111 


i . 


■:‘i^;//i2vM. 




4 


t .• f 


J^. 




.' Ii • 


; ■ ■ -n 


'i- •■^‘ • 


l> 




• I 




k'»*Ai 


L> 


• I 


• _ I. 


v* 


.'v 




' ‘Xfij 






L/'-f'<‘‘>ir ■ ■■ 


i 

i . Vi : /I '-A ’ ^ 

•' / -S' * *■■' - * '* 




Ji 


'fi 


i' 


i n^'^ f ■ ■! *, ‘4^' >'T7 

-r.'' ■■ 'TO 


»i .* • 


V 


VI y. 


i 


1 


V 

■' fi;'.;- ( .■,: 




d.i. »ft •. rJrti I' W'wry4p“ 




If i 


I . I 


> I 


r. 


I. • • 




. ‘V ■ • 
'I. .■ ^ - '. 

((■•'Nl ' 

r^v,-. . ' 


U , ■', , > ■ ‘i, u-i-v 




‘ T ' .', 






'.V4! 




m 






VV» / V ■ ^ •• 

/ ;V I V f 




ii 


il 


,4 


.X > 


( 


!• 


*• » 






5WB 


! 4 ' 




;o.. 


• /< »l* 


iv 





!fc:r iKJ;. 


J ,■ ‘ 


' * 4 )’ ■ 

4 , Ai 




v:- 


»V 1 ' 


;g: 




>yi 




L^L 


.n 


I ) 








JUN to 19tt 


One copy del. to Cat. Div. 


)4if^ i5 








































































































































